Elvis estate and Eminem's publisher sue Suno over AI voice clones

Elvis Presley's rights holders and Eminem's publisher filed separate federal lawsuits against the AI music generator Suno on Friday, November 6, 2026, adding a voice-cloning claim to the music industry's copyright fight with the company.

Both complaints were filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California by the same legal team, led by Richard Busch of Adams & Reese. The Presley case runs 51 pages and is docketed as 3:26-cv-13398. Eight Mile Style, the Ferndale, Michigan, publisher that controls 269 Eminem compositions, filed its own 32-page suit the same day, docketed as 3:26-cv-13399. Suno, Inc. is the defendant in both, and Eminem is not a plaintiff.

The Presley complaint names Elvis Presley Enterprises LLC, ABG EPE IP LLC (a unit of Authentic Brands Group), Raleigh Music Publishing and a group of family trusts and other song owners as plaintiffs. It lists 859 songs and alleges direct copyright infringement, circumvention of protection measures, removal of copyright management information, violation of Tennessee's 2024 Ensuring Likeness Voice and Image Security Act (the ELVIS Act) and Tennessee common law right of publicity.

The voice claim is the new part. According to the complaint, entering a performer's name into Suno's create function "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." The filing says a prompt made only of lyrics spelling Presley's name, submitted in October 2026, produced tracks carrying a copy of his voice.

"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," the complaint states. "The next Elvis won't pick up a guitar," the plaintiffs' lawyers wrote, arguing that Suno's race to the bottom aims to make human creativity obsolete.

Both cases seek statutory damages at the maximum rate for willful infringement, $150,000 a work, which is a demand rather than an award. For the Presley plaintiffs, 859 works at $150,000 comes to $128.85 million. Eight Mile Style's 269 compositions at the same rate come to $40.35 million. Eight Mile Style also seeks $672,500 for alleged circumvention of access controls, which lifts its stated demand to just over $41 million, the figure the Detroit Free Press and CBS News Detroit reported. Reading all of the complaint's claim lines, the outlet alfw.ai adds a further $6.725 million for removal of copyright management information, near $47.75 million.

The Presley complaint adds comparable copyright and metadata lines, and its ELVIS Act and right-of-publicity claims seek actual damages, profits and punitive damages with no fixed total, so no single figure covers either case.

The Eight Mile Style complaint says Suno "has built their entire business model based on copyright infringement at a scale heretofore unseen," and that $10 a month buys songs generated from copies it calls illicit. It cites a Suno-generated track titled "Slim shady x Rosefalls," with cover art and vocals the publisher says are derived from Eminem's voice, and a generation that reproduced the lyrics of "Lose Yourself" verbatim. Both complaints quote a previous Suno court disclosure that its model was trained on "essentially all music files of reasonable quality that are accessible on the open Internet," and cite reports that Suno scraped songs from YouTube Music, Deezer and Genius.

Suno denies it trades on artists' identities. "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," a company spokesperson said in a statement to Billboard and CBS News. "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." The complaints say those guardrails are easily bypassed, and cite one prompt string of genre terms that produces a Slim Shady-style track without naming him.

Suno's most recent filing on the subject is a November 3, 2026, motion to dismiss the right-of-publicity class action brought by the singer Jason Isbell and other artists in Massachusetts, where Suno argued its outputs "do not replicate the auditory characteristics of any real artist's voice." The Presley complaint calls that claim "unequivocally false."

The lawsuits add to a crowded docket. Suno was first sued in June 2024 by the major labels, later settled with Warner Music Group, and is still litigating with Universal Music Group and Sony Music; the publishers Round Hill Music and Reservoir have also filed. Suno raised more than $400 million at a $5.4 billion valuation in June 2026. Lark-Marie Antón, a spokeswoman for Authentic Brands Group, told Billboard the new case and its evidence "speak for themselves."

For creators, the cases test how far a voice model's guardrails must go. The ELVIS Act is the first state law written to hold companies liable for the tools that let users clone a performer's voice, so a ruling could shape what prompts an AI music generator will accept.

The Presley complaint attaches video exhibits it says show the Suno outputs, and states there are "hundreds to thousands more like it."

Suno must answer both complaints after service, and neither case had a scheduled hearing as of Sunday, November 8, 2026.