The legal battle between the music industry and artificial intelligence companies, Anthropic and Suno, has taken another significant turn.

A major independent music publisher has now filed two separate federal lawsuits on the same day, targeting both an AI music generation platform and one of the most prominent AI companies in the world.

Anthropic, Suno Face New AI Copyright Lawsuit

Reservoir Media Management filed two copyright infringement lawsuits on October 21, 2026, in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, one against Suno and one against Anthropic. The two suits are related but separate, covering different sets of works and different allegations about how those works were allegedly misused.

The combined potential statutory damages across both cases reach nearly $340 million. The Suno lawsuit covers 1,050 musical compositions, while the Anthropic lawsuit focuses on the lyrics of 853 compositions. The plaintiffs in both cases are Reservoir Media Management, its UK subsidiary, and Shapiro, Bernstein & Co. Limited, which the UK arm owns outright.

Anthropic responded to the allegations in a statement shared with Billboard, saying that it disagrees with the claims and intends to defend the case vigorously. Suno had not issued a public comment in response to the lawsuit at the time the filings became public.

Reservoir Media: Anthropic, Suno Used Music For AI Training

In the case against Suno, Reservoir alleges the AI music generation company reproduced, distributed, and created unauthorized derivative works from its copyright-protected compositions to train Suno's generative AI models without obtaining any license or authorization. Beyond basic infringement, the complaint also accuses Suno of circumventing digital access controls and removing copyright management information from the works, practices that carry additional liability under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

The evidence cited in the Suno complaint includes Suno's own leaked source code. According to the filing and analysis of that code, multiple Reservoir-owned compositions appear directly in the data, including "Both Sides Now" by Joni Mitchell, "Diamonds on the Inside" by Ben Harper, "Ring of Fire" as performed by Johnny Cash, and additional titles.

Metadata from what appears to be a second internal file was also found to contain references to additional Reservoir catalog titles, including works by Big & Rich and Kings of Leon as well as additional Joni Mitchell recordings.

The complaint against Anthropic takes a different angle, focusing specifically on the alleged reproduction and use of song lyrics rather than musical recordings. The filing accuses Anthropic of copying the lyrics of 853 compositions from Reservoir's catalog to train its AI models, specifically its Claude family of models, in violation of copyright.

The complaint uses pointed language to characterize the conduct, arguing that Anthropic treated copyright infringement as a shortcut to avoid training its models from scratch.

Madonna, Johnny Cash, Joni Mitchell Affected

The catalog works named in the two complaints span some of the most recognizable songs in popular music. Across the Suno and Anthropic filings, specifically named works include Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now" and "Big Yellow Taxi," Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire," Madonna's "Papa Don't Preach," Miles Davis's "So What," "In the Mood" as recorded by Glenn Miller and His Orchestra, Billy Strayhorn's "Lush Life," Ben Harper's "Diamonds on the Inside," and four songs by Evanescence, among many others.

Joni Mitchell is the most represented individual artist across the Suno complaint's exhibit, with 149 of the 1,050 compositions credited to her, roughly one in seven of the total works listed.

The Reservoir lawsuits are not the only copyright actions Suno and Anthropic have faced in the music space. Independent publisher Round Hill Music filed copyright infringement suits against both companies in August 2026.

Anthropic has also faced ongoing litigation from a broader group of music publishers over the use of copyrighted lyrics in Claude's training, a case in which a federal judge previously declined to dismiss several of the publishers' claims. In a separate copyright dispute unrelated to music, Anthropic reached a $1.5 billion settlement with authors over its training practices.

BMG has also filed suit against Anthropic over the alleged use of Bruno Mars and Rolling Stones lyrics in AI training.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Is Reservoir Media Management, Inc.?

Reservoir Media Management, Inc. is one of the largest independent music publishers in the United States, founded in 2007. The company owns and manages the rights to an extensive catalog of songs spanning multiple genres and eras, representing the works of artists including Joni Mitchell, John Denver, and many others through various acquisition and signing agreements.

Reservoir also owns Shapiro, Bernstein & Co., one of the oldest music publishers in the United States, dating back to 1895. In addition to publishing, Reservoir manages master recordings and has a recorded music division. The company went public in 2021 and trades on Nasdaq under the ticker RSVR. Its catalog is particularly deep in classic popular music, jazz, and folk, with Joni Mitchell's body of work representing one of its most prominent holdings.

What Is Suno?

Suno is an AI music generation platform founded in 2022 and based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It allows users to create original songs by typing a text prompt describing a style, mood, or theme, and the system generates complete tracks including vocals and instrumentation.

Suno's models are trained on large datasets of audio and song data, and the platform became one of the most popular consumer-facing AI music tools after its public launch in 2023. The company raised substantial venture funding and attracted millions of users. Suno previously faced a major copyright lawsuit filed in 2024 by the Recording Industry Association of America on behalf of the major record labels, which alleged that Suno had trained its models on copyrighted recordings without authorization. That case and the present Reservoir lawsuit are separate proceedings.

Is AI Training Using Music Illegal?

The legal status of using copyrighted music to train AI models remains one of the most actively contested and unresolved questions in intellectual property law. The core dispute centers on whether training an AI model on copyrighted works qualifies as fair use under US copyright law, a doctrine that allows limited use of protected material without permission under certain conditions.

AI companies have generally argued that training is transformative and therefore fair use, while rights holders have argued that mass reproduction of their works for commercial AI development is not the kind of use Congress intended fair use to protect. As of October 2026, no US federal court had issued a definitive ruling settling the question in the context of music AI training, leaving it an open issue across dozens of pending cases. The Reservoir lawsuits add to what the US Copyright Office has described as more than 80 AI-related copyright cases filed since 2023, with courts still working through the foundational legal questions that will determine the outcome of all of them.