Reservoir Media sues Suno and Anthropic over song training, seeking over $340 million combined

What happened

On October 21, 2026, Reservoir Media Management, Inc. (plus its UK subsidiary and Shapiro, Bernstein & Co. Limited) filed two separate copyright lawsuits in the US District Court for the Northern District of California: one against Suno and one against Anthropic. Both complaints were obtained and reported by Music Business Worldwide on October 22.

The Suno suit

Reservoir alleges Suno copied 1,050 of its compositions to train its models without permission, accusing the company of having "built its entire business model based on copyright infringement at a scale never seen before." Named works include Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now," Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire," Madonna's "Papa Don't Preach" and Evanescence's "Bring Me to Life." Reservoir seeks actual damages and Suno's profits, or statutory damages up to $150,000 per willfully infringed work - pleaded at $157.5 million, plus two DMCA counts (circumvention of access controls: $2.625 million; removal of copyright management information: $26.25 million), for a total pleaded above $186 million.

The Suno complaint also seeks impoundment or destruction of unauthorized copies "including copies retained in training datasets, internal repositories, model weights, and server infrastructure," and cites leaked Suno source code (reported by 404 Media in July) to allege scraping of millions of songs from YouTube Music, Deezer and Genius via Bright Data proxy services.

The Anthropic suit

In the same-court, same-day filing, Reservoir alleges Anthropic copied the lyrics of 853 of its compositions to train Claude without permission, and that Claude generates copies and derivative works of those lyrics in response to prompts. Named works include Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi" and "Both Sides Now," Madonna's "Papa Don't Preach," Billy Strayhorn's "Lush Life" and Evanescence's "Bring Me to Life." Pleaded totals: $127.95 million in statutory damages plus DMCA counts of $2,132,500 and $21,325,000 - just over $151.4 million in total.

The Anthropic complaint leans on Bartz v. Anthropic (Alsup's June 2025 ruling that there is "no carveout ... from the Copyright Act for AI companies") and claims Claude's outputs nearly reproduce the songs. Anthropic told reporters it disagrees with the allegations and will defend vigorously; Suno declined to comment. Both cases are at the allegation stage; no ruling has issued.

Scope note

Both suits were filed October 21, 2026 (N.D. Cal.). Reservoir is represented by Richard S. Busch of Adams & Reese (counsel in the Blurred Lines case), with Skaggs Faucette LLP as local counsel.