The owners of Elvis Presley’s likeness, and of publishing rights in many of his best-known songs, are suing AI music generator Suno.
Eight Mile Style, which co-publishes hundreds of Eminem songs, has filed a separate lawsuit against the company.
Both complaints were filed on November 6 in the US District Court for the Northern District of California.
The Presley complaint can be read in full here, and the Eight Mile Style complaint here.
The Presley plaintiffs put statutory damages for copyright infringement at USD $128.85 million, across 859 compositions that include hundreds associated with other artists. The figure applies the legal maximum of USD $150,000 per song for willful infringement.
They are seeking a further USD $2,147,500 for allegedly bypassing access controls and USD $21.475 million for allegedly stripping songwriter and publisher credits from their songs.
Elvis Presley Enterprises, which the complaint says solely owns Presley’s likeness rights, is also seeking damages “believed to exceed $50 million” over Suno’s alleged use of his voice and likeness. It pleads that figure twice, under two separate Tennessee claims.
Counting it once, the figures pleaded across all of the claims come to just over USD $202 million, before any tripling or punitive damages.
Eight Mile Style’s complaint covers 269 compositions, and the figures it pleads come to just over USD $47.7 million.
The Presley suit relies in part on Tennessee’s ELVIS Act, short for Ensuring Likeness, Voice, and Image Security.
According to the complaint, Tennessee passed the law to shield artists from AI companies, and asked Presley’s rightsholders for permission before naming it after him.
The plaintiffs include Elvis Presley Enterprises and ABG EPE IP, both controlled by Authentic Brands Group, as well as Raleigh Music Publishing, Abilene Music, trusts, and individual rightsholders.
The complaint alleges that Suno trained its AI on Presley’s recordings and now lets users generate new songs in a voice that listeners recognize as his.
“Suno has stolen Elvis’ voice, his image, and likeness … as well as his copyrighted works on, literally, a breathtaking scale, and must now be called to answer for its theft,” the filing states.
“Suno has stolen Elvis’ voice, his image, and likeness … as well as his copyrighted works on, literally, a breathtaking scale, and must now be called to answer for its theft.”
Elvis Presley Enterprises‘ complaint
The plaintiffs cite at least 17 outputs that they say reproduce songs they control, including Can’t Help Falling in Love and the Chubby Checker hit Let’s Twist Again.
Elvis Presley Enterprises says it has found at least 38 Suno outputs that use Presley’s voice or likeness.
“Those examples … are NOT examples of Elvis Presley singing,” the complaint states.
“They are synthetic and unlicensed uses of Elvis’ voice and likeness, which have been reproduced, published, publicly performed, distributed, displayed and made available to the public by Suno to sell its products and services, with the knowledge that these uses of his voice and likeness were unauthorized. There are hundreds to thousands more like it.”
On November 3, Suno asked a judge in Boston to dismiss a proposed class action brought by Jason Isbell and three other musicians, as MBW reported last week.
In that filing, Suno said its outputs “do not replicate the auditory characteristics of any real artist’s voice to the point that someone would confuse a Suno creation with one actually sung by a particular famous musician.”
Quoting an August blog post by co-founder and CEO Mikey Shulman, the filing also said the company has “never allowed prompts for specific artists or copyrighted songs.”
“These statements are unequivocally false, and Plaintiffs have concrete proof of the exact opposite of Suno’s claims,” the Presley complaint responds.
It says that as recently as October 7, Suno generated two tracks titled He Is Still The King from lyrics alone, with no style prompt.
The lyrics, which are quoted in the complaint, spelled out Presley’s name with spaces between the letters and referred to rockabilly.
Each output “contained a copy of Elvis’ unmistakable and iconic voice singing over a rockabilly-style generated track,” according to the complaint.
Spacing out an artist’s name was also the workaround alleged in the Isbell case, and Suno’s motion there described such prompts as “atypical requests.”
“The next Elvis won’t pick up a guitar,” the Presley complaint states. “Suno’s ravenous race to the bottom aims to make human creativity obsolete, coldly replicating without a license in seconds what takes years to learn …”
Elvis Presley Enterprises is also seeking triple damages under the ELVIS Act, plus punitive damages under Tennessee common law.
Its case for triple damages rests on Presley’s US Army service from 1958 to 1960, which it says makes him a “member of the armed forces” under Tennessee law.
It also wants a court order barring Suno from using Presley’s voice or likeness.
The Presley suit is an early test of whether the ELVIS Act’s clause on technology whose “primary purpose or function” is producing a particular person’s voice or likeness can reach a general-purpose AI music generator. If it can, artists and estates covered by Tennessee law could hold AI platforms liable over a simulated voice even where no output reproduces a copyrighted song.
Isbell’s Boston case also includes a claim under Tennessee law. Suno’s motion argues that it fails because he hasn’t alleged that Suno used his voice, and the plaintiffs’ response is due on December 1.
Eight Mile Style, which sued alongside Martin Affiliated, says it owns and administers the 269 Eminem compositions at issue.
Eminem himself is not a plaintiff.
The complaint claims that a Suno track titled Lose Yourself By Eminem, created for a user, “copies, verbatim, the lyrics” of the original.
It makes similar allegations about Suno outputs of ’Till I Collapse, The Real Slim Shady, Houdini, and Ass Like That.
The filing also cites leaked Suno source code, which it says contains 4,210 characters of Lose Yourself lyrics saved from a scrape of Genius.
Like the Presley suit, the complaint alleges that Suno’s filter on prompts naming specific artists is easily bypassed.
It cites a third-party service, HookGenius, which it says pitches its USD $29 “Suno Mastery Guide” as a way to create “Eminem-style prompts for Suno.”
The complaint separately alleges that Suno has given commissioned referral links to content creators, including one whose YouTube tutorial teaches users how to get around the filter.
“Suno is paying people to teach others how to get around its own guardrails in order to drive traffic and purchases of paid subscriptions,” the complaint states.
“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,” both filings state.
Both complaints also accuse Suno of bypassing streaming services’ access controls to copy music, and of stripping songwriter and publisher credits from the files it collected.
Eight Mile Style’s pleaded figures break down into USD $40.35 million in statutory copyright damages, plus USD $672,500 for allegedly bypassing access controls.
It adds a further USD $6.725 million for allegedly stripping credits from its songs.
Like the Presley plaintiffs, the publisher also wants Suno to hand over all unauthorized copies of its songs for impoundment or destruction, “including copies retained in training datasets, internal repositories, model weights, and server infrastructure.”
If granted, those requests would reach Suno’s trained AI models, not just its stored files.
A Suno spokesperson said in a statement: “Suno exists to help people create new, original music, not to trade on anyone’s name or likeness, and we prohibit any unauthorized use of an artist’s work.
“To protect against this, we do not allow prompts for specific artists’ names and songs and work with third-party providers to screen uploaded audio files and lyrics for potential misuse. We are always working to strengthen our guardrails and we will continue to add new safeguards that protect artists and our users.”
In its October 20 answer to the second lawsuit brought against it by Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment, Suno admitted that it “previously prevented users from submitting prompts containing artist names, and that as of January 2026, users may include artist names in their prompts.”
Suno denied that those prompts are used to generate outputs “without first converting the artist name to a style description.”
Both suits were filed by Richard S. Busch of Adams & Reese, who won the Blurred Lines case for Marvin Gaye’s family while at King & Ballow.
His team sued Suno and Anthropic on behalf of Round Hill Music on August 17, sued Suno for Gerencia 360 Music on August 31, and sued both companies again for Reservoir on October 21.
Reservoir’s complaint against Suno, which covers 1,050 compositions, used the same “infringe now” line.
Many of the same rightsholders, led by ABG EPE IP, sued Anthropic on October 23, alleging it copied the lyrics of 274 songs to train its Claude models.
Anthropic told MBW at the time that it disagreed with the claims and intended to defend the case.
Eight Mile Style is separately suing Meta over 243 compositions, in a case that a federal judge narrowed in June, letting only its direct infringement claim proceed.
Both new complaints also cite Suno’s defeat in Germany, where a Munich court ruled in July that it had infringed copyrights in songs represented by collecting society GEMA.
Suno told MBW at the time that it disagreed with the ruling and was evaluating its options, including an appeal.
Suno raised more than USD $400 million at a USD $5.4 billion valuation in June.
Warner Music Group settled with Suno and struck a licensing deal with it in November 2025, while UMG and Sony are still suing the company.Music Business Worldwide
