Suno and Anthropic sued over use of Madonna, Johnny Cash, Joni Mitchell songs
Suno and Anthropic have been sued for allegedly using songs and lyrics by Madonna, Johnny Cash, and Joni Mitchell to train AI systems, with the two cases seeking a combined $338 million. Reservoir said Suno has admitted in court during the 2024 record company lawsuit that it copied nearly all music files of passable quality on the open internet, while Anthropic is accused of removing attribution information. Anthropic said it disagrees with the allegations and will actively defend itself.
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The two lawsuits, totaling $338 million, make the copyright risks of AI training data concrete in the music field and can be compared with the progress of earlier lawsuits filed by record companies.
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The Man in Black couldn’t have imagined this. AI companies Suno and Anthropic face a combined $338 million in lawsuits for allegedly using songs and lyrics by Madonna, Johnny Cash and Joni Mitchell to train their artificial intelligence systems.
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“We disagree with the allegations and intend to defend this case vigorously,” a representative for Anthropic told Billboard.
Representatives for Suno and Anthropic didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
Reservoir founder and CEO Golnar Khosrowshahi told Music Business Worldwide that the AI music industry can’t be allowed to exploit songwriters’ work.
“When we believe their work has been exploited without authorization, we will hold AI platforms legally accountable to ensure those rights are upheld,” Khosrowshahi said. “We will continue to advocate for a framework that supports technological progress while protecting the creative work at the heart of our industry.”
Lawsuits are piling up
AI models are trained when their companies feed a vast amount of data — text, images, music, videos and software code — into their AI systems. With all that data, as well as synthetic data generated by computers, AI models can learn to generate words, images and video that may appear human-created.
In the lawsuit filed last week, Reservoir said Suno has already admitted to copying “essentially all music files of reasonable quality that are accessible on the open internet,” a statement Suno made in court during a 2024 suit brought by Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Music Group.
This summer, a hacker cracked into Suno’s code and revealed that the company allegedly scraped music and lyrics from platforms like YouTube Music, Deezer, Genius and stock music libraries. The hack showed more than 2 million clips in a folder called “youtube_music,” as well as thousands of hours of music from the lyrics database Genius HQ, the music streaming service Deezer, and the stock music site Pond5.
In the lawsuit, Reservoir says that Suno is not truly a platform for people to create music and “was instead always meant to replace the artists whose works were being unlawfully copied by directly reaching those artists’ listeners with AI-generated substitutes which copy the originals.”
Anthropic allegedly stripped credits
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