Another pair of music-industry heavyweights has taken Suno to court. The AI tool, which writes and sings a whole song from a short text prompt, was hit on 6 November by one complaint from the people who manage Elvis Presley’s legacy and a separate one from Eminem’s publisher.
The Elvis case is the more unusual of the two. Its lawyers rely partly on Tennessee’s ELVIS Act, passed in 2024, which makes it unlawful to clone a singer’s voice and also lets the owners go after businesses that supply the tools. If a judge accepts that, a platform could be liable for what its users make, and not only the person who posts a fake. The 51-page complaint, filed in a California federal court by Elvis Presley Enterprises, Authentic Brands Group and Raleigh Music Publishing, says that simply putting Elvis’s name in Suno’s Create box brings back a voice that sounds like his, and that a test last month produced such a track from lyrics that only mentioned him.
Suno’s lawyers have argued in the Isbell case that artist names in prompts are only shorthand for a genre, not a way to lift someone’s voice; the Elvis complaint says last month’s test shows otherwise. The ELVIS Act was billed as the first law of its kind in the US, and it dropped the older requirement that a likeness be used commercially, as in an unlicensed advertisement. Authentic Brands Group’s spokesperson said the case and its evidence “speak for themselves” and that the company protects Elvis’s name, image, likeness and music vigorously. Richard Busch, the lawyer who filed the case, wrote that there are “hundreds to thousands” more examples like the ones the complaint cites.
Eight Mile Style, the publisher that holds rights to hundreds of Eminem’s compositions, is making an ordinary copyright claim. It accuses Suno of training on his songs and lyrics without a licence and of letting users produce tracks that echo them, with three of his biggest hits, including Lose Yourself, cited as examples. Eminem himself is not a party.
Suno has defended itself before on the same ground: a named artist cannot be requested, it says, and outside services check what people upload. The Elvis lawyers call that “unequivocally false” and say they have video of songs made on the platform that sound close to Presley.
The label giants Sony Music and Universal Music Group are already suing Suno, as are Reservoir Media and the singer Jason Isbell, whose September likeness suit the Elvis complaint closely resembles. Warner Music Group went the other way last year, dropping its case in return for a licensing deal. The same Elvis rights group sued Anthropic recently over 274 songs it says were used to train Claude.
Nothing has been ruled on yet, and each side’s claims are still only allegations.
