Elvis Rights Holders and Eminem's Publisher Sue AI Music Firm Suno

Suno just picked up two more lawsuits. A coalition of Elvis Presley music rightsholders — including Authentic Brands Group and Raleigh Music Publishing — and Eight Mile Style, the publisher controlling hundreds of Eminem recordings, filed separate complaints in the Northern District of California. Both accuse the AI music generator of copyright infringement, according to Variety.

The Presley filing runs 51 pages and goes after more than copyright. It claims Suno exploited Presley's identity whenever users drop his name into a prompt, and that the platform violated Tennessee's Ensuring Likeness Voice and Image Security Act — the ELVIS Act — a 2024 law barring AI companies from cloning a singer's voice. The suit says users can generate tracks mirroring Presley's 'rich vocal timbre' without anyone's permission.

Eight Mile Style, which owns the rights to hits like 'Lose Yourself,' 'Without Me' and 'The Real Slim Shady,' makes a similar argument on the rap side: it says Suno let users spit out songs and lyrics that echo Eminem's catalog. Eminem himself isn't a party to the case, and his rep didn't respond to a request for comment. Suno also stayed quiet when asked about the filings.

Attorneys Richard Busch, Mark Block, David Niemierzycki and Andrew Davis represent both camps. Their argument is blunt: they say Suno 'mechanically encoded itself with artists' identities, hard-work, creativity, and time,' then turned it all into 'a consistent conveyor belt of cold hard cash.' The Presley complaint puts a finer point on it — 'The next Elvis won't pick up a guitar,' the attorneys wrote, warning that Suno's 'ravenous race to the bottom' threatens to make human creativity obsolete.

The Presley case echoes a class-action push led by Americana singer Jason Isbell, which claims Suno lets users dodge its guardrails by prompting for an artist's 'tone and phrasing,' swapping stage names for real ones, or slipping spaces between letters. Attorney Alan D. Rose wrote that the suit seeks to recover 'the value of those misappropriated identities.' Suno has denied the allegations and argued in court there's 'nothing unlawful' about requesting a song in the style of an artist.

This is a widening legal pileup. Authentic Brands Group joined other Presley publishers last month in suing Anthropic for $48.6 million over 274 Presley songs allegedly used to train Claude. Eight Mile Style went after Meta in June for roughly $110 million over 243 recordings; Meta called the case 'fanciful,' but a Michigan federal judge let it proceed to discovery. Suno is already fighting Round Hill Music, Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment — Sony and UMG sued again over Suno's label-backed 'v6' model, calling it 'the fruit of the same poisoned tree.' Warner Music Group settled last year. None of it has dented Suno's momentum: it raised $400 million in June at a $5.4 billion valuation.