On October 21, 2026, independent music company Reservoir Media Management and two affiliates filed two copyright suits in the US District Court for the Northern District of California: one against Anthropic (5:26-cv-12308) and one against AI music generator Suno (3:26-cv-12305). On October 23, the owners of a catalogue of songs recorded by Elvis Presley - ABG EPE IP LLC with several music trusts, individuals and publishers - filed a near-identical complaint against Anthropic (5:26-cv-12473). All three are brought by the same lawyers, Adams and Reese with Skaggs Faucette, and each pleads direct copyright infringement, circumvention of protection measures under 17 U.S.C. 1201, and removal or alteration of copyright management information.
The Anthropic complaints allege that lyrics were scraped from licensed lyrics sites and collected in datasets such as Common Crawl and The Pile to train Claude, that copyright management information was stripped, and that Claude still reproduces songs. Both quote a recent Claude output in which, asked to recreate songs “for a modern audience”, it said: “These renders keep landing very close to the originals”. Reservoir lists 853 compositions, including Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” and Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire”, and puts maximum statutory damages for infringement at $127,950,000. The Elvis plaintiffs list 274 works, including “Can’t Help Falling in Love”, and seek $41,100,000. Both note that other music suits against Anthropic, including Concord Music Group v. Anthropic, are pending in the same district.
The Suno complaint lists 1,050 compositions and seeks up to $157,500,000 in statutory damages for infringement. It alleges Suno trained on music taken from streaming and paywalled services, and that it stream-ripped YouTube recordings using tools such as yt-dlp to get around YouTube’s “rolling cipher” protection, which is the basis for its anti-circumvention claim.
Why it matters: these suits widen the music industry’s fight with AI developers from the major publishers to independent catalogue owners, and they target both a text model that reproduces lyrics and a music model trained on recordings. The anti-circumvention claims matter because they do not depend on how courts resolve fair use for training.
What it does not show: these are complaints. The damages figures are statutory maximums the plaintiffs calculated themselves, not amounts any court has found or awarded. No court has ruled on any of the claims.