The owners of Elvis Presley’s intellectual property are suing Suno in a new lawsuit that claims the artificial intelligence music company violated the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll’s likeness rights by stealing his voice.
Weeks after suing AI giant Anthropic for training Claude on Elvis songs, the new case filed Friday (Nov. 6) by Elvis Presley Enterprises levels similar copyright accusations against Suno, the leading AI music firm. But it also includes legally-novel allegations that Suno broke the law by letting users clone Presley’s “unmistakable and iconic voice.”
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“All of the humanity, history, despair, and triumph that constitutes Elvis’ identity was stolen and is stored on servers and harnessed by Suno to make massive amounts of money,” writes Richard Busch, a veteran music litigator at the firm Adams & Reese who filed the case. “Suno did so intentionally, maliciously, and fraudulently to financially benefit itself and artificially compete with Elvis’ likeness and copyrights, and continues to do so to this day.”
The new lawsuit marks one of the first major cases under a new Tennessee law, coincidentally called the ELVIS Act, that was recently enacted to address problems caused by AI. The first-in-the-nation statute was touted as a weapon against people who create illegal deepfakes, but it also allows for lawsuits against tech firms that enable such voice and image cloning in the first place.
Taken together with the Anthropic case, the suits over Elvis represent easily most significant action filed on behalf of an individual musician over AI — in this case, arguably the most famous recording artist of all time. Suno and Anthropic were already facing cases from music labels accusing them of infringing millions of copyrighted songs to train their models, as well as a class action by smaller artists who similarly say Suno stole their likenesses.
Friday’s lawsuit was filed by Elvis Presley Enterprises, a unit of the licensing giant Authentic Brands Group that controls the intellectual property tied to Elvis, including much of his song catalog and the rights to his name, image and likeness. In a statement to Billboard on Saturday, ABG spokeswoman Lark-Marie Antón said the new lawsuit and its evidence “speak for themselves.”
“The name, image, likeness, and music of Elvis Presley are among the most valuable intellectual property assets in the world,” Antón said. “We protect those rights vigorously.”
In statement Saturday responding to the lawsuit, a Suno spokeswoman told Billboard: “Suno exists to help people create new, original music, not to trade on anyone’s name or likeness, and we prohibit any unauthorized use of an artist’s work. To protect against this, we do not allow prompts for specific artists’ names and songs and work with third party providers to screen uploaded audio files and lyrics for potential misuse. We are always working to strengthen our guardrails and we will continue to add new safeguards that protect artists and our users.”
The looming battle with Suno will raise untested legal questions about the extent to which AI companies can be sued for allegedly ripping off a musical artist’s identity. The use of AI to convincingly mimic real people has been one of the booming technology’s most controversial applications, and no where less so than an industry largely built on famous singing voices.
“Elvis’ voice possessed a distinctively rich vocal timbre, with a warm velvety resonance and perfectly employed vibrato, coupled with his ability to vary his technique and delivery within the same song as well as across several different styles of music, which became his immediately recognizable musical signature across the world,” the lawsuit says.
Suno has argued in other lawsuits that its current models do not allow users to include the names of specific artists in prompts, nor produce outputs that mimic specific real voices. But in Friday’s complaint, the Elvis owners say those claims are “unequivocally false.” They included links to videos capturing the use of Suno’s platform to play songs that sound remarkably similar to Presley.
“Those … are NOT examples of Elvis Presley singing. They are synthetic and unlicensed uses of Elvis’ voice and likeness,” Busch writes. “There are hundreds to thousands more like it.”
The new case will test the power and limits of the ELVIS (Ensuring Likeness Voice and Image Security) Act, a law enacted in 2024 in Presley’s adopted home state to make it easier for musicians to bring such cases. Existing laws typically only applied to commercial exploitation of someone’s likeness, like an unauthorized advertisement; the new statute removed those restrictions. ELVIS also specifically imposed liability on companies that provide tools allowing for unauthorized use of a person’s likeness.
“Suno is the embodiment of why the ELVIS Act was so essentially required,” the lawsuit reads. “Suno has stolen Elvis’ voice, his image, and likeness, as well as his copyrighted works on, literally, a breathtaking scale, and must now be called to answer for its theft.”
Suno’s lawyers have argued such claims won’t hold up in court. In an earlier likeness case filed by Jason Isbell and other artists, the AI firm’s lawyers argued it merely uses artist names as “shorthand for the genre they perform in” and does not allow for direct theft of their voices. But the new lawsuit says that as recently as last month, Suno generated an Elvis clone based simply on lyrics that included his name.
“Entering a musician’s name into Suno’s ‘Create’ function, such as Elvis’, causes Suno to generate unauthorized output based on his [name, image and likeness], which copies and reproduces the signature and recognizable aspects of his distinguished voice,” Busch writes in the new case.
In addition to the new voice claims, the lawsuit echoes the same accusations made against Anthropic over training on copyrighted Elvis songs, including “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” arguably Presley’s most famous track; “Don’t Be Cruel,” one of his early massive hits; and “A Little Less Conversation,” “All Shook Up,” “Return to Sender” and “(You’re the) Devil in Disguise”. And like the earlier case, the new lawsuit claims Suno stole those songs in order to replace human artists.
“The next Elvis won’t pick up a guitar,” the Presley Enterprises lawyers write. “Suno’s ravenous race to the bottom aims to make human creativity obsolete, coldly replicating without a license in seconds what takes years to learn, struggle with, maintain, and endlessly attempt to make better and perfect.”
Separately on Friday, the same attorneys another case against Suno on behalf of Eight Mile Style, a publisher that owns much of Eminem’s catalog. That case includes similar copyright allegations as the Elvis case, accusing the lab of training its models on the rapper’s “Lose Yourself,” “Without Me,” “Till I Collapse,” “The Real Slim Shady, “Stan” and other hits.
The Elvis and Eminem cases add to mounting legal challenges for Suno. The company was first sued in 2024 by all three major music companies over AI training. Though it settled with Warner Music Group last year and has vowed to partner with the music industry, is still litigating with UMG and Sony Music — who have shown no interest in striking a deal. It has also faced new cases in recent months from music publishers Round Hill Music and Reservoir, as well as the Isbell case over likenesses.
