Elvis Presley Estate Sues Suno Over Voice Cloning and Copyright Infringement

Elvis Presley Enterprises filed a federal lawsuit against AI music startup Suno on Friday, alleging the company trained its models on copyrighted Elvis recordings without permission, stripped copyright metadata from the tracks, and violated Tennessee's ELVIS Act by cloning the singer's voice and likeness. [6]

The complaint, filed in the Northern District of California, names Suno, Inc. as defendant and asserts claims under the ELVIS Act, Tennessee common law right of publicity, direct copyright infringement, circumvention of protection measures, and removal or alteration of copyright management information. The plaintiffs are demanding a jury trial. [6]

Two distinct legal theories

The lawsuit advances two separate arguments. First, it alleges direct copyright infringement: that Suno copied seven specific Elvis recordings—"Can't Help Falling in Love," "Don't Be Cruel," "A Little Less Conversation," "All Shook Up," "Return to Sender," "(You're the) Devil in Disguise" and "If I Can Dream"—to train its AI models, and that Suno's outputs reproduce those songs. [6] Second, it invokes Tennessee's Ensuring Likeness, Voice, and Image Security Act, which took effect July 1, 2024, and added "voice" to the state's post-mortem publicity rights statute. The ELVIS Act also permits suits against companies that build the tools enabling unauthorized voice cloning. [1][6]

"The King has not left the building. According to the complaint, he lives on Suno's servers," wrote Mubert in its analysis of the case. [1] The complaint states: "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, despite Suno being there for none of what it took to create, maintain, or attempt to live up to this image, and without license, permission, or payment." [6]

Lead counsel Richard Busch of Adams & Reese represents the plaintiffs, which include Elvis Presley Enterprises (a unit of Authentic Brands Group), multiple trusts, and music publishing entities that collectively control Elvis's name, image, likeness rights and copyrighted compositions. [1][6]

Exhibits and specific outputs

The complaint includes five exhibits linking to recorded examples of Suno outputs. Exhibit A contains five recordings allegedly infringing both Elvis's NIL rights and copyrighted works, including a track titled "Elvis Presley - Blue Suede Sin Medley" that the complaint says reproduces "Can't Help Falling in Love," "All Shook Up" and "Don't Be Cruel" simultaneously with an Elvis-like voice. Exhibits B and C contain 33 additional recordings allegedly infringing Elvis's NIL rights. Exhibits D and E contain nine and three recordings respectively allegedly infringing copyrighted compositions. [6]

The complaint also alleges Suno's "Explore" search function returns "albums" and "playlists" when users type "Elvis," and that Suno's "Voices Feature" allows Pro subscribers to save and reuse vocal segments—including one labeled "Elvis"—to generate new commercial outputs. [6]

Suno's prior statements contradicted

The complaint directly challenges representations Suno made in a separate Massachusetts case, Isbell v. Suno, where Suno moved to dismiss on November 3. In that filing, Suno stated: "by design and in practice, Suno outputs do not ... reprise specific melodies from songs someone else wrote; and they do not replicate the auditory characteristics of any real artist's voice to the point that someone would confuse a Suno creation with one actually sung by a particular famous musician." Suno also claimed it "has never allowed prompts for specific artists or copyrighted songs." [6]

The Elvis complaint calls these statements "unequivocally false" and points to its exhibits as "concrete proof of the exact opposite." It also quotes Suno CEO Mikey Shulman's August 2026 blog post asserting the same guardrails. [6]

Training data and scraping allegations

The complaint alleges Suno admitted to copying "essentially all music files of reasonable quality that are accessible on the open Internet"—a dataset of tens of millions of songs—and that publicly available sources confirm Suno scraped YouTube Music, Deezer, and Genius using proxy services from Bright Data. Leaked source code reportedly shows 2,057,486 artist records from YouTube Music and 6,980,653 processed Genius song pages. [6]

The company settled with Warner Music Group in November 2025 and has since announced licensing deals with BMG, Believe, and other rights holders. A Munich court ruled against Suno in July 2026 in a case brought by German collecting society GEMA, finding Suno infringed copyrights by training on GEMA's repertoire without a license. [6]

Same day, another major suit

On the same day as the Elvis filing, Eminem's publisher Eight Mile Style sued Suno in the same district, seeking over $41 million in damages. The same law firm represents both plaintiffs. [1]

The Elvis estate previously sued Anthropic in October 2026 over 274 Presley songs allegedly used to train Claude, seeking up to $41.1 million. Anthropic said it would defend the case. [1][2]

Why this case matters

Unlike pure copyright cases that ask whether a model learned from protected works, the ELVIS Act claim asks whether the output is the protected person. "Copyright cases ask if a model learned from your songs, while the ELVIS Act asks if the output is you," Mubert noted. "That is much easier to explain to a jury, because anyone can play the clip and hear it." [1]

The case also tests Suno's defense in the Isbell litigation that artist names are merely shorthand for genre descriptions. The Elvis complaint describes Elvis's voice as having "a distinctively rich vocal timbre, with a warm velvety resonance and perfectly employed vibrato" and cites the Ninth Circuit's observation that a voice is as distinctive and personal as a face, and that to impersonate a singer's voice is to pirate her identity. [6]

Suno did not respond to requests for comment from Billboard or WREG by publication time. [1][3][5] A Suno spokesperson told VICE that the company exists to help people create new, original music, not to trade on anyone's name or likeness; that it prohibits any unauthorized use of an artist's work; that it does not allow prompts for specific artists' names and songs and works with third-party providers to screen uploaded audio files and lyrics for potential misuse; and that it is always working to strengthen its guardrails and will continue to add new safeguards that protect artists and users. [2]

The Isbell plaintiffs' reply is due December 1; Suno's answer in the Elvis case is due December 15. [1]