Suno has two more lawsuits on its hands. A group of rights holders of Elvis Presley’s music and the publisher behind some of Eminem’s biggest records accuse the AI music company of generating music and lyrics that mimic those artists. The Verge laid out the filings on Sunday.
Lawyers for the Presley side are invoking Tennessee’s Ensuring Likeness Voice and Image Security Act, the ELVIS Act, which makes it illegal for an AI company to clone a singer’s voice. The complaint says Suno “has mechanically encoded itself with artists’ identities, hard-work, creativity, and time, and harnessed them all for a consistent conveyor belt of cold hard cash.”
It continues: Suno’s “ravenous race to the bottom” aims to make human creativity obsolete by replicating without a license, in seconds, what takes years to learn and struggle with.
Suno points to prompt-level blocks
Spokesperson Cat McCormack told The Verge that Suno “exists to help people create new, original music, not to trade on anyone’s name or likeness,” and that unauthorized use of an artist’s work is prohibited. Concretely: prompts for specific artists’ names and songs are not allowed, and third-party providers screen uploaded audio files and lyrics for misuse. The company says it keeps strengthening its guardrails.
Both filings sit close to one brought by Jason Isbell and others in September, which also alleged imitation of the plaintiffs but stopped short of claiming copyright infringement directly. On top of that come the cases from Sony, UMG and Reservoir.
Right of publicity beats copyright here
The legal route is the interesting part. The ELVIS Act asks whether a recognizable voice comes out the other end, which is checkable at the output window by anyone. Training-data questions, by contrast, grind through court for years.
For anyone working with generative models, that is the news. If you produce voices, faces or characters, you are dealing with the publicity and likeness rules of individual countries and states, not only with copyright. Suno’s answer already shows where that leads: prompt filters, upload screening, blocklists of names. The same machinery Claude and the other providers run in their safeguards is now coming for audio.