Music publisher Reservoir sues Suno and Anthropic for using more than 1,900 songs without permission to train their AI
IA en un minuto newsroom · Editor: Jon Elgezabal
In 30 seconds
Reservoir, an independent music publisher, has taken Suno and Anthropic to US federal court in two separate cases. According to its filings, the two companies trained their AI on more than 1,900 of its compositions, including songs by Madonna, Johnny Cash and Joni Mitchell, and it is seeking more than 337 million dollars. Anthropic replies that it rejects the allegations and will defend itself.
Independent music publisher Reservoir filed two lawsuits on Wednesday, October 21, one against Suno and another against Anthropic, in the federal court for the Northern District of California. It claims the two companies used more than 1,900 works from its repertoire without permission to train their AI models, among them Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi", Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire" and Madonna's "Papa Don't Preach". Billboard, which obtained the filings, was the first outlet to report it.
In the case of Suno, the AI-generated music company, the complaint attaches an exhibit with 1,050 compositions whose US rights Reservoir says it holds exclusively. It seeks the damages it suffered plus Suno's profits or, failing that, up to 150,000 dollars for each work knowingly infringed, and adds two counts under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). In total, it comes to just over 186 million dollars, according to Music Business Worldwide.
The lawsuit against Anthropic, the company that develops Claude, focuses on the lyrics of 853 compositions that, according to Reservoir, were copied to train its models; it also accuses Claude of reproducing them or creating derivative works when a user asks. There, the three counts add up to a little over 151.4 million. Taken together, the two lawsuits seek more than 337 million dollars, as calculated by Infobae. In both cases, Reservoir also asks for the unauthorized copies to be impounded or destroyed, including those it believes remain in the training data and in the parameters of the models.
Neither company is facing this kind of lawsuit for the first time. Universal Music and Sony Music are still fighting Suno in court, while Warner Music reached a settlement with it last year, followed by deals with BMG and Believe. Reservoir's lawyers, led by Richard Busch, already sued Suno in August on behalf of Round Hill Music and Gerencia 360. Anthropic has several open lawsuits from music companies in that same district; in one of them, brought in 2023 by Concord, Universal Music and ABKCO, Judge Eumi Lee heard both sides on October 21 itself over whether using song lyrics to train Claude is protected as fair use, and has not yet ruled. In September 2025, Anthropic agreed to a 1.5 billion dollar settlement with a group of book authors who had sued it in a class action.
An Anthropic spokesperson told Billboard that the company disagrees with the allegations and plans to defend itself firmly; a representative for Suno did not want to comment. Reservoir's founder and chief executive, Golnar Khosrowshahi, said AI technology "must not be built on the exploitation of intellectual property" in ways that violate creators' rights. The next step is for the two companies to respond in court.
Why it matters · analysis and opinion
An independent publisher joining the lawsuits that the major labels started shows that the legal front against AI music is widening, with the same lawyers and arguments. The most striking part is the request to remove what, according to the complaint, remains inside the models themselves: if a judge accepted it, the cost of training without a licence would no longer be just a payout. Reservoir also uses the deals Suno has already signed with part of the industry as proof that paying for music was possible. Anyone using music or lyrics generators for commercial purposes would do well to check the provider's terms and whether they cover them against a copyright claim.
Source: Billboard · Written with the help of AI: how we make the news
