Music publisher Reservoir Media has sued Anthropic and Suno in two separate federal lawsuits, alleging both companies trained AI models on its copyrighted songs without a license. The complaints, filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, cover 1,050 compositions in the Suno case and 853 in the Anthropic case, and together seek statutory damages approaching $340 million.
The suits cite songs including Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now" and "Big Yellow Taxi," Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire," Madonna's "Papa Don't Preach" and Evanescence's "Bring Me to Life." The plaintiffs are Reservoir Media Management, its UK affiliate, and Shapiro, Bernstein & Co., which the UK entity wholly owns. Richard S. Busch of Adams & Reese represents Reservoir in both cases.
“As AI continues to reshape the music landscape, its innovative technology must not be built on the exploitation of intellectual property”— Golnar Khosrowshahi, Founder and CEO of Reservoir
Anthropic rejected the claims. A company spokesperson said Anthropic disagrees with the allegations and intends to defend the case vigorously. Suno had not responded to a request for comment.
Key facts
- 01Reservoir Media filed two suits in the Northern District of California: 1,050 works against Suno, 853 against Anthropic.
- 02Statutory damages sought total just over $186 million from Suno and just over $151.4 million from Anthropic.
- 03Named works include Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now," Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire" and Madonna's "Papa Don't Preach."
- 04Anthropic said it disagrees with the allegations and intends to defend the case vigorously; Suno had not commented.
- 05Reservoir also asks for destruction of unauthorized copies, including those in training datasets and model weights.
In the Anthropic complaint, Reservoir alleges that lyrics to its 853 works were copied to train Claude models, and that Claude produces copies of those lyrics, or derivative versions, in response to user prompts. Reservoir seeks up to $150,000 per willfully infringed work, or $127.95 million on the copyright count. Two DMCA counts, for alleged circumvention of access controls and removal of copyright management information, add roughly $23.5 million, bringing the total to just over $151.4 million.
The Suno complaint alleges the company used proxy services from Bright Data to scrape songs and lyrics from YouTube Music, Deezer and Genius, relying on source code a hacker obtained and that was reported publicly in July. It cites a "youtube_music" training dataset of more than two million clips, about 113,879 hours of audio. Bright Data is not a defendant. When the hack was first reported, Suno said it involved outdated source code that is no longer in use.
Against Suno, Reservoir seeks $157.5 million in statutory damages on the copyright claim plus $2.625 million and $26.25 million on its two DMCA counts, a total of just over $186 million. The complaint also alleges that Suno's guardrails against imitating named artists are easy to get around, including in its v6 model, which it says redirects artist-name prompts toward descriptive musical traits.
Both complaints argue fair use does not apply. Reservoir cites Bartz v. Anthropic, the June 2025 Northern District of California ruling in which Judge William Alsup wrote that "There is no carveout, however, from the Copyright Act for AI companies," along with the Third Circuit's September 29 decision in Thomson Reuters v. ROSS Intelligence. It also points to Suno's licensing deals with Warner Music Group, BMG and Believe as evidence of a working market for training-data licenses.
Beyond damages, Reservoir asks the court for an injunction and for the impoundment or destruction of unauthorized copies of its works, including copies held in training datasets, internal repositories, model weights and server infrastructure.
The Reservoir case is one of several music-publisher suits against Anthropic in the same court. Round Hill Music filed a similar case on August 17 using the same legal team. Suno also faces claims from Universal Music and Round Hill, and lost a case brought by German rights group GEMA in the Munich Regional Court on July 31, after which Suno said it was evaluating all available options, including an appeal.
Working on something we should cover, or seeing a story we missed? Send leads, documents, or feedback to hello@aichatdaily.com. For sensitive tips, see our secure tips page for Signal and PGP options.
Spotted an error? Email hello@aichatdaily.com with the URL and the issue, or read our full corrections policy.
