Rights holders representing Elvis Presley and Eminem have filed a lawsuit against AI music generator Suno, alleging the company trained its models on copyrighted recordings and allowed users to produce songs mimicking the artists’ voices without authorisation. The complaint, reported by The Verge AI, was lodged this week and adds two of music’s most commercially valuable estates to a growing roster of plaintiffs challenging AI music platforms.
The lawsuit alleges that Suno’s text-to-music tool can generate outputs closely resembling the vocal timbre, phrasing and stylistic signatures of both artists when prompted with their names or descriptive cues. According to the filing cited by The Verge AI, the plaintiffs argue this constitutes both copyright infringement through unauthorised training data use and a violation of rights of publicity, which protect a person’s likeness and voice from commercial exploitation.
Suno, which has raised substantial venture funding and positions itself as a generative tool for musicians and amateurs alike, has previously defended its training practices under fair use doctrine, arguing that learning from existing recordings to generate new, non-identical output falls within permitted bounds. The company did not immediately offer new comment on the Elvis and Eminem claims, per The Verge AI’s reporting.
Context: a widening legal front
This suit follows earlier litigation filed in 2024 by major record labels, including Universal Music Group, Sony Music and Warner Music, against both Suno and rival platform Udio, alleging mass copyright infringement through the unlicensed use of sound recordings to train their models. The entry of individual artist estates — rather than only corporate labels — signals a broadening of plaintiffs willing to test AI music generators in court, and raises the stakes around voice and likeness rights specifically, an area distinct from traditional sound-recording copyright.
Eminem’s catalogue is among the most heavily sampled and referenced in commercial hip-hop, while the Presley estate has aggressively protected likeness rights for decades, including through earlier disputes over merchandising and impersonation. Their involvement suggests rights holders view AI voice cloning as a threat comparable to unauthorised sampling or counterfeit merchandise — but at far greater scale.
Business impact
For AI music start-ups, the lawsuit raises the cost and complexity of operating without direct licensing deals. Suno has reportedly been in licensing discussions with major labels, and a protracted legal fight could accelerate pressure to settle or restructure its training data pipeline. Investors in generative audio platforms — a sector that has attracted hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital over the past two years — face renewed uncertainty about the durability of fair-use defences.
Record labels and artist estates stand to gain leverage, either through settlements that establish licensing precedents or through court rulings that narrow what AI firms can train on without consent. Conversely, smaller AI music developers lacking Suno’s legal resources could be squeezed out or forced into early licensing agreements on less favourable terms. For consumers and independent musicians using these tools, the outcome could determine whether AI-generated music remains broadly accessible or becomes gated behind licensed, rights-cleared catalogues.
The case also intersects with at least one quantifiable business risk: statutory damages under US copyright law can reach up to $150,000 (£118,000) per infringed work in cases of wilful infringement, a figure that scales quickly across the catalogues of artists as prolific as Eminem and Presley.
What to watch next
Expect scrutiny of whether Suno reaches settlement terms similar to those being negotiated with major labels, and whether other estates — from the Prince estate to living artists with heavily cloned voices — file parallel claims. Courts’ treatment of voice and likeness rights alongside copyright claims could also shape forthcoming state and federal AI legislation addressing digital replicas.
The lawsuit underscores that AI music’s commercial future will be decided as much in courtrooms and licensing negotiations as in model architecture, with rights holders determined to set the price of admission.
