Music publisher Reservoir woke up on Oct. 21 and chose chaos, filing two federal lawsuits in the Northern District of California against Suno and Anthropic for allegedly training AI models on its copyrighted songs without asking or paying. The Suno case covers 1,050 compositions, while the Anthropic case targets the lyrics of 853 songs allegedly used to train Claude. The complaints trot out a jukebox worth of tunes, including Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi,” Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” and Madonna’s “Papa Don’t Preach.” Who knew “Big Yellow Taxi” would one day be the soundtrack to a robot learning to write songs about paved paradise?
Joni Mitchell Would Like A Word
Reservoir’s core argument is that each company “built its entire business model based on copyright infringement at a scale never seen before.” That phrase sounds like something a lawyer practices in the mirror before a big deposition. The publisher says the material got copied first, licensed never, and commercial products got stacked on top afterward. The Suno complaint even lists “In the Mood” as recorded by Glenn Miller and His Orchestra, so somewhere Glenn Miller is asking what the hell a subscription tier is.
The price tag is not small, either. Across the two suits, Reservoir is seeking more than $186 million from Suno and more than $151 million from Anthropic in statutory damages, plus a court order to destroy copies of the songs, including any baked into training data and model weights.
Ten Bucks And A Dream
The Suno filing gets specific in a way that borders on petty poetry. Reservoir’s attorney, Richard Busch of Adams and Reese, writes that Suno made illicit copies of millions of works and then built a platform “where anyone capable of paying $10 per month can create complete songs based entirely on these illicit copies,” as Billboard first reported.
Ten dollars. That’s two fancy coffees and a bagel in most cities. Suno’s Pro plan does in fact run $10 a month on monthly billing, which makes the whole thing feel less like a crime ring and more like a very aggressive vending machine.
Forgiveness Cheaper Than Permission
Busch doesn’t tiptoe around motive. “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,” he writes. That’s not a legal strategy. That’s a kid stealing a candy bar and offering to pay for it after eating half. The complaint adds that “seeking forgiveness is clearly more profitable than permission,” arguing Suno skipped the permission route on purpose. Brutal. Also accurate, if Reservoir is right.
Your Guitar Teacher Is Safe For Now
Reservoir also goes after the tool’s whole reason for existing. The suit says the platform was “never meant to be a tool for artists to create music” but was instead always meant to replace the artists whose work got copied. That’s the part of the complaint that stings the most, honestly.
There’s a difference between a toy that helps you write a chorus and a machine trained on decades of human heartbreak so it can churn out something that sounds like Evanescence if Evanescence were a fax machine. Artists have mortgages. Algorithms don’t.
Half The Robot Gallery Speaks Up
Suno declined to comment, according to Billboard. Shocking. Truly. In the history of corporate communications, no company has ever rushed to the phone after getting sued over a thousand allegedly stolen songs. Suno is presumably busy doing whatever AI companies do when nobody’s watching, which is probably generating a country song about getting served papers.
Anthropic, on the other hand, actually picked up the phone. “We disagree with the allegations and intend to defend this case vigorously,” a company spokesperson told Billboard. So one side of the robot gallery is lawyering up loudly, and the other is staring at the wall.
Suno’s Rap Sheet Gets Longer
This isn’t Suno’s first rodeo. Round Hill Music sued both Suno and Anthropic in August, and independent musicians have filed proposed class actions against Suno, too. Warner Music Group settled its lawsuit with Suno in November 2025, and BMG and Believe, neither of which sued, signed licensing deals of their own.
Universal Music Group and Sony Music have not settled and are still swinging. Their original 2024 lawsuit is ongoing, and on Sept. 18 they filed a second suit insisting Suno’s new v6 model is still illegal. That’s the funniest part. Suno updated its model, and the response was essentially “Nice try, still illegal.” You can almost hear the sad trombone.
Partnership Model Gets Side Eye
Suno rolled out its v6 models on Sept. 9, about six weeks before the lawsuit landed, billing them as its first built in partnership with the music industry, with Warner Music, BMG and Believe on board. Reservoir’s response amounts to a long, slow blink. The publisher blasted Suno’s “about-face” and “sudden willingness” to work with the industry, framing it as part of that same infringe-now, settle-cheap-later playbook. Fair.
Worth noting that Universal and Sony are not buying the partnership framing either. Their new lawsuit argues that training v6 on the outputs of Suno’s earlier models doesn’t erase the alleged infringement, calling the new model the “fruit of the same poisoned tree.” So the word partnership is doing a lot of heavy lifting, and everyone involved knows it.
The Whole Industry Is Watching
Reservoir’s lawsuits add one more big-name independent publisher to the growing pile of rights holders challenging how AI companies train their models on music. Fans who mess around with AI music tools might eventually see the fallout shape what’s available on platforms like Suno, depending on how courts rule or how settlements shake out. That matters because the average person using these tools has no idea what’s under the hood. They just want a song about their cat. The cat song comes at a cost, and the cost might be the entire recorded music catalog.
No Court Dates, Just Vibes
No court dates or hearing schedules have been reported yet, which is the legal equivalent of a group chat going quiet after somebody drops a bombshell. Reservoir’s cases join the two active Universal and Sony lawsuits against Suno in Massachusetts federal court, plus the pile of music publisher suits already facing Anthropic.
That’s the thing about these cases. They move slower than a dial-up modem loading a Joni Mitchell fan page. In the meantime, Suno keeps selling $10 subscriptions, and Reservoir keeps counting the songs it says got stolen. Somewhere, Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” is playing, and it sounds a little different now.
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