Another music company has taken Suno to court, and this time Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is in the same fight. Reservoir, a Nasdaq-listed independent music company, filed two copyright lawsuits on Wednesday 21 October (US time) in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. It alleges that Suno copied 1,050 of its compositions to train its AI music models, and that Anthropic copied the lyrics of 853 compositions to train Claude, all without permission. The songs named include Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now”, Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire”, Madonna’s “Papa Don’t Preach” and Evanescence’s “Bring Me to Life”.
Anthropic told Billboard: “We disagree with the allegations and intend to defend this case vigorously.” A representative for Suno declined to comment. None of Reservoir’s claims has been tested in court.
What Reservoir claims against Suno
The Suno complaint, reported by Music Business Worldwide and Billboard, lists 1,050 compositions whose US copyrights Reservoir says it owns outright or exclusively controls. Reservoir accuses Suno of having “built its entire business model based on copyright infringement at a scale never seen before.”
One of its sharpest arguments uses Suno’s own licensing deals against it. Warner Music Group settled with Suno in November 2025, and BMG and Believe have since signed licensing deals with the platform ahead of its v6 models, which launched on 9 September. By striking those deals, the complaint argues, Suno “has all but admitted that there is a functioning market for licensing music and sound recordings for training data.” Reservoir says Suno never sought or obtained a licence from it.
“Suno’s business model was admittedly and clearly: infringe now, make billions by being the first mover, and try to settle on the cheap later.” — Reservoir’s complaint against Suno
The complaint also draws on Suno source code that was obtained by a hacker and reported by 404 Media in July. Citing that report, Reservoir alleges Suno used proxy services from data company Bright Data to scrape “millions of songs and lyrics” from YouTube Music, Deezer and Genius, and that several of the songs in the case appear in the leaked code. When 404 Media reported the hack, Suno said the incident primarily involved “outdated source code that is no longer in use at Suno.”
On outputs, Reservoir argues that Suno’s guardrails against imitating existing artists “are easily circumvented”. According to MBW, the complaint says Suno will not accept a prompt containing the name Reba McEntire but will accept a request for a female-vocal country song “in the style of Reba McIntyre [sic]”. Reservoir also argues that fair use does not apply, citing the June 2025 ruling in Bartz v. Anthropic, which held that keeping a permanent library of pirated copies was not fair use.
What Reservoir claims against Anthropic
The second case focuses on lyrics. Reservoir alleges Anthropic copied the lyrics of 853 of its compositions to train its Claude models, and that Claude generates copies of, and derivative works based on, those lyrics when users ask. Songs named include Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” and “Both Sides Now”, Madonna’s “Papa Don’t Preach” and Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life”.
Anthropic is already defending several music copyright cases in the same court. Concord, Universal Music Publishing Group and ABKCO sued in October 2023 and again in January 2026, BMG sued in March 2026, and Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music filed their own suit on 28 August. Round Hill Music sued both Anthropic and Suno on 17 August, represented by the same legal team as Reservoir.
How much is at stake
In both cases Reservoir is seeking actual damages and the defendants’ profits or, alternatively, statutory damages of up to US$150,000 for each work willfully infringed. Music Business Worldwide reports that, together with two claims under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act over alleged circumvention of access controls and removal of copyright management information, the figures pleaded come to just over US$186 million against Suno and just over US$151.4 million against Anthropic.
Reservoir also wants an injunction and the impoundment or destruction of unauthorised copies of its works, “including copies retained in training datasets, internal repositories, model weights, and server infrastructure.” That request matters because a court order touching model weights would go further than a payment.
Reservoir founder and CEO Golnar Khosrowshahi said in a statement: “As AI continues to reshape the music landscape, its innovative technology must not be built on the exploitation of intellectual property in ways that violate the rights of creators.”
A growing pile of cases against Suno
Reservoir is the latest in a long line. Universal Music Group and Sony Music first sued Suno in June 2024 and filed a second lawsuit on 18 September 2026 covering 60,202 recordings, alleging Suno’s v6 models were trained on the outputs of earlier models. In its answer to that second case, filed on 20 October, Suno admitted that it “has not deleted all of the sound recordings it has used to train its AI models”, saying this was consistent with the labels’ own earlier demand that it keep its training data sets. Suno denies infringement and argues any copying is fair use.
Suno also lost a first-instance case brought by German collecting society GEMA at the Munich Regional Court on 31 July, and said at the time it was evaluating its options, including an appeal. Round Hill Music and Regional Mexican label Gerencia 360 have separate cases in California. Suno raised more than US$400 million in June at a valuation of US$5.4 billion.
What happens next
Suno and Anthropic will have the chance to respond to the complaints, either by answering them or by asking the court to dismiss them. No hearing dates have been reported. In the meantime, Suno’s response to a separate class action brought by musicians including Jason Isbell is due on 3 November.
Why it matters
For AI music creators
Every new suit puts more weight on one question: what was a tool trained on, and was it licensed? Suno now markets v6 as built with label partners, yet rights holders that have not signed deals keep suing over its earlier training. If you make music with AI, it is worth reading each platform’s terms on ownership and licensing, and keeping records of how your tracks were made.
For songwriters and publishers
Most of the big AI music deals so far have been with record labels, which control recordings. Reservoir’s cases are a reminder that the songs themselves, the melodies and lyrics, carry separate rights held by publishers and songwriters. The Anthropic case goes further, arguing that a general-purpose chatbot trained on lyrics is a music copyright problem too. Australia is having its own debate about AI training and copyright, which we covered in Australia’s AI copyright opt-out fight.
For listeners
These cases will help decide whether AI music grows through licensed partnerships or through years of litigation. Either way, transparency about how a track was made is becoming part of how music is judged.
Following AI music on Dizy
Dizy is built on disclosure: artists declare whether a track is AI-assisted or AI-generated when they submit, and listeners decide what rises. See the Overall Top 40, browse New releases and AI artists, or submit your track. For more on the labels’ case against Suno, read Suno Lawsuit: Labels Want Investor Lightspeed to Testify, and for the fight over who gets paid from AI licensing deals, see Musicians Union Demands AI Consent and Pay From Labels.
Sources
Billboard: Reservoir Sues Suno & Anthropic in Latest Lawsuits Over AI Music (22 October 2026)
