Independent music company Reservoir has filed separate copyright lawsuits against Anthropic and Suno, alleging that both companies copied its songs without permission to train their AI models. The two complaints were filed on Wednesday 21 October in the US District Court for the Northern District of California.
The complaint against Anthropic lists 853 compositions and alleges that Anthropic copied their lyrics to train its Claude models. The complaint against Suno lists 1,050 compositions and alleges that the AI music company copied them to train its song generator. Both name works including Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now, Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire and Madonna’s Papa Don’t Preach.
The plaintiffs are Reservoir Media Management, Inc. and two subsidiaries incorporated in England and Wales: Reservoir Media Management (UK) Limited and Shapiro, Bernstein & Co. Limited. Each complaint opens by alleging that the defendant “built its entire business model based on copyright infringement at a scale never seen before”.
Reps for Suno and Anthropic did not immediately respond to requests for comment, Billboard reported.
The complaint alleges Claude was trained on public datasets containing Reservoir lyrics
Reservoir alleges, “upon information and belief”, that Anthropic trained Claude on datasets including Common Crawl and The Pile, and that these contained lyrics to each of its 853 works scraped from licensed lyrics sites. It also alleges that Claude still produces close copies of songs. It quotes a recent Claude response saying its renders “keep landing very close to the originals” and are “edging past ‘inspired by’ into reproducing the copyrighted song”.
“Anthropic’s business model was admittedly and clearly: infringe now, and hope for a two-trillion-dollar IPO later,” the complaint says. It leans on the 2025 Bartz ruling against Anthropic over pirated books, quoting Judge William Alsup: “There is no carveout, however, from the Copyright Act for AI companies.”
The filing lands a day after Anthropic asked a federal judge to rule that training Claude on lyrics is fair use, in a separate case brought by Universal, Concord and ABKCO. That judge has not yet ruled.
The Suno complaint uses the company’s licensing deals against it
The Suno complaint alleges that Suno scraped music from streaming services, partly using tools supplied by data company Bright Data, which is not a defendant. It cites leaked Suno source code reported by 404 Media and a July ruling against Suno by a Munich court in a case brought by German collecting society GEMA.
Its sharpest argument concerns Suno’s settlement with Warner Music Group and its deals with BMG and Believe. By striking them, the complaint alleges, Suno “has all but admitted that there is a functioning market for licensing music and sound recordings for training data”. It says Suno’s model was to “infringe now, make billions by being the first mover, and try to settle on the cheap later”.
Golnar Khosrowshahi, Reservoir’s founder and chief executive, told Music Business Worldwide that when Reservoir believes the work it represents “has been exploited without authorization, we will hold AI platforms legally accountable to ensure those rights are upheld”.
Both complaints price every song at the statutory maximum
The headline figures are ceilings, not losses. Reservoir’s main demand in both cases is actual damages and the defendants’ profits. Statutory damages are sought “in the alternative”, at “up to $150,000 per Work willfully infringed”.
TSN checked the arithmetic. Against Anthropic, 853 works at $150,000 gives the complaint’s $127.95m. Two further counts under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, for circumventing access controls and removing copyright management information, apply the complaint’s stated per-violation caps of $2,500 and $25,000 to each work, giving $2.13m and $21.33m. Together that is $151.4m. Against Suno, the same method gives $157.5m, $2.63m and $26.25m, or $186.4m. Across both suits the pleaded figures total about $337.8m.
That calculation counts one DMCA violation per work, at the maximum, so the totals depend on Reservoir proving wilful infringement and persuading a court to award the top rate on every song.
Fair use will decide both cases
Both complaints argue fair use does not apply. The Suno filing cites the Third Circuit’s decision in Thomson Reuters v. ROSS, which rejected a fair-use defence for AI trained on Westlaw headnotes. “There is simply nothing fair about a company using theft to build for purely commercial purposes a multi-billion-dollar business,” it says.
Authors are pressing the same question against Meta in around 300 individual claims. TSN tracks these cases in its AI copyright lawsuits tracker.
Neither defendant has yet filed a response. Each faces a jury demand from Reservoir.
Sources
- Reservoir Media Management, Inc. v. Anthropic PBC, No. 5:26-cv-12308 (N.D. Cal.), Complaint, 21 October 2026 (CourtListener RECAP)
- Reservoir Media Management, Inc. v. Suno, Inc., No. 3:26-cv-12305 (N.D. Cal.), Complaint, 21 October 2026 (CourtListener RECAP)
- Music Business Worldwide: Suno and Anthropic sued by Reservoir for infringing songs by Joni Mitchell, Johnny Cash, Madonna and more, 22 October 2026
- Billboard: Reservoir Sues Suno & Anthropic in Latest Lawsuits Over AI Music, 22 October 2026
Related stories
- Anthropic Seeks Fair-Use Ruling on Claude Lyrics as Judge Weighs First AI Trial
- AI Copyright Lawsuits: Cases, Rulings and Deals
- Around 300 Authors Bring Individual AI Copyright Claims Against Meta
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