Elvis Presley rights holders sue Suno over AI voice cloning under Tennessee's ELVIS Act

What happened

On 6 November 2026, Elvis Presley Enterprises, LLC and co-plaintiffs including ABG EPE IP LLC, the Luigi Creatore Trust, Abilene Music LLC and Raleigh Music Publishing LLC filed a 51-page complaint against Suno, Inc. in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California (No. 3:26-cv-13398), alleging Suno's AI music generator clones Elvis Presley's voice and infringes the plaintiffs' copyrights in 859 songs.

Claims

The complaint brings claims under Tennessee's Ensuring Likeness, Voice, and Image Security (ELVIS) Act, Tennessee common-law right of publicity, direct copyright infringement, circumvention of protection measures, and removal or alteration of copyright management information. It alleges Suno lets users generate tracks in Presley's voice without a licence, and that the state of Tennessee asked the Presley rights holders for permission before naming the ELVIS Act after him.

Evidence cited

The complaint attaches recorded examples: it says that on 7 October 2026 a prompt consisting only of lyrics produced two tracks called 'He Is Still The King', each with a copy of Presley's voice, and that a Suno track 'Elvis in The Jailhouse Rock' was still live on Suno with more than 125,000 plays. It says Suno's outputs contradict Suno's 3 November 2026 motion-to-dismiss filing in a separate Massachusetts case (Isbell et al. v. Suno), in which Suno said its outputs do not replicate the auditory characteristics of any real artist's voice.

Relief sought

The plaintiffs seek up to $150,000 per wilfully infringed song, which at the maximum would come to almost $129 million, plus treble and punitive damages under Tennessee law and further sums for circumvention and CMI removal. They also ask Suno to destroy every unlicensed copy, including copies in 'training datasets, internal repositories, model weights, and server infrastructure'.

What this is not

These are allegations in a newly filed complaint. No court has found that Suno infringed. Suno has not yet answered this complaint in court; a Suno spokesperson told the Detroit Free Press that 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.' This is distinct from the same rights holders' suit against Anthropic over 274 Presley songs, filed in October 2026 and already published.