Elvis Catalogue Owners and Reservoir File New AI Lyrics Suits Against Anthropic and Suno

By Dafa Attas

Photo: Ylanite / Pixabay

Music owners filed three new AI copyright suits in San Francisco in a single week. On 21 October 2026, independent publisher Reservoir Media sued both Anthropic and Suno in the Northern District of California. Two days later, on 23 October, Authentic Brands Group, which controls Elvis Presley's intellectual property, and other companies, trusts and individuals holding rights in his songs brought their own case against Anthropic in the same court, according to NBC News and Bloomberg Law.

The Elvis complaint

According to NBC News and The Guardian, the Elvis plaintiffs say Anthropic used the lyrics of 274 songs, including "Can't Help Falling in Love" and "Return to Sender", to train its Claude models without a licence. They also say Claude still produces close rewrites of the songs when users ask, despite filters added after earlier lawsuits. NBC reports that the complaint seeks USD 41.1 million in statutory copyright damages, which is the USD 150,000 maximum for each of the 274 works allegedly infringed wilfully. Bloomberg Law reports a total of up to USD 48.6 million, because the complaint also claims damages under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. An Anthropic spokesperson told NBC the company disagrees with the claims and will defend the case.

Reservoir's two cases

Reservoir's complaint against Anthropic (No. 5:26-cv-12308) covers 853 compositions, according to a summary of the filing by Copyright Now. It alleges, partly on information and belief, that the lyrics reached Claude through web scraping and datasets such as Common Crawl and The Pile, were kept in a permanent internal library, and lost their songwriter and publisher credits during data cleaning. The parallel suit against Suno (No. 5:26-cv-12305, according to the court docket) concerns 1,050 compositions, including works by Joni Mitchell and Johnny Cash. According to PPC Land's reading of the complaint, it alleges that the AI music service copied recordings by getting around platform protections, and puts statutory damages at USD 157.5 million on the main copyright count.

Why the claims go beyond training

The common thread is that the plaintiffs are not relying only on the argument that training is infringement. According to Copyright Now, PPC Land and Bloomberg Law, each complaint also pleads claims under section 1201 of the US Copyright Act, for circumventing access controls, and section 1202, for removing copyright management information such as titles and credits. Reservoir also relies on Bartz v. Anthropic, where a judge in the same court held in 2025 that keeping unlicensed copies in a general-purpose library was not fair use, even though training on books was found to be fair use. These claims target how data was collected and stored, which may be harder to defend as fair use than the training step.

The suits join earlier copyright cases against Anthropic in the same district, including two brought by Concord Music Group and one by BMG, which the Reservoir complaint lists as related.

What it means for Asia and Indonesia

Indonesia is reviewing the same questions. On 12 March 2026, the House of Representatives (DPR) approved a bill amending Copyright Law No. 28 of 2014 as its own initiative, and the DPR lists the use of artificial intelligence among the issues to be discussed. Reports on a circulating draft say AI training would be subject to fair use rules or a licence, but the text is not final. We are not aware of an Indonesian court decision on AI training with song lyrics. Developers building or fine-tuning models in the region should keep records of where their training data came from and avoid stripping credit information, because those are the points US plaintiffs now attack first.

Sources

• Docket, Reservoir Media Management, Inc. v. Suno (N.D. Cal., No. 5:26-cv-12305)
• NBC News, "Elvis Presley's rights holders sue Anthropic, saying it trained AI on his music" (25 October 2026)
• The Guardian, "Anthropic sued for allegedly using 274 Elvis Presley songs to train AI models" (25 October 2026)
• Bloomberg Law, "Anthropic Sued for Using Elvis Lyrics to Train Claude" (26 October 2026)
• Copyright Now, "Reservoir Media sues Anthropic over Claude training on and outputs of lyrics from 853 compositions" (22 October 2026)
• DPR RI, "Mayoritas Fraksi DPR Setujui RUU Perubahan UU Hak Cipta Jadi Usul Inisiatif" (12 March 2026, in Indonesian)
• Literasi Hukum Indonesia, "Draf Revisi UU Hak Cipta Mulai Mengatur Karya Berbantuan AI dan Kompensasi Platform" (in Indonesian)
• PPC Land, "Reservoir sues Suno for $157.5m over 1,050 songs in AI training data" (25 October 2026)