The owners of Elvis Presley’s intellectual property have sued Suno, an artificial intelligence (AI) music company, claiming it violated the singer’s likeness rights by taking his voice. The case was filed in Tennessee, a U.S. state, and is one of the first major lawsuits under the state’s new ELVIS Act.
The complaint#
The complaint was filed on Friday, Nov. 6, by Elvis Presley Enterprises, a unit of the licensing company Authentic Brands Group (ABG). Weeks earlier, the same company sued Anthropic over training its Claude model on Presley’s songs.
The new filing makes copyright claims similar to those against Anthropic, this time against Suno, which it describes as the leading AI music firm. It also argues that Suno broke the law by letting users clone Presley’s “unmistakable and iconic voice.”
Allegations against Suno#
Richard Busch, a veteran music litigator at the firm Adams & Reese, filed the case. In it, he writes: “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 lawsuit also states: “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.”
Suno’s response and the Elvis owners’ reply#
Suno has argued in other lawsuits that its current models do not allow users to include specific artists’ names in prompts, nor produce outputs that mimic specific real voices. The Elvis owners call those claims “unequivocally false.” The filing points to videos that it says show Suno’s platform being used to play songs that sound remarkably similar to Presley.
Busch writes: “Those … are NOT examples of Elvis Presley singing. They are synthetic and unlicensed uses of Elvis’ voice and likeness. There are hundreds to thousands more like it.”
In an earlier likeness case filed by Jason Isbell and other artists, Suno’s lawyers argued that the company uses artist names as “shorthand for the genre they perform in” and does not allow direct theft of their voices. The new lawsuit says that as recently as last month, Suno generated an Elvis clone based only on lyrics that included his name.
Busch writes in the new case that “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.”
The ELVIS Act#
The ELVIS (Ensuring Likeness Voice and Image Security) Act was enacted in 2024 in Presley’s adopted home state of Tennessee to make it easier for musicians to bring such cases. Existing laws typically applied only to commercial exploitation of someone’s likeness, such as an unauthorized advertisement. The new statute removed those restrictions and imposes liability on companies that provide tools allowing unauthorized use of a person’s likeness.
The lawsuit states: “Suno is the embodiment of why the ELVIS Act was so essentially required. 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.”
Response and related cases#
A spokeswoman for ABG, Lark-Marie Antón, said in a statement on Saturday that the new lawsuit and its evidence “speak for themselves.” She added: “The name, image, likeness, and music of Elvis Presley are among the most valuable intellectual property assets in the world. We protect those rights vigorously.”
A spokeswoman for Suno did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday.
Suno and Anthropic already face lawsuits from music labels accusing them of infringing millions of copyrighted songs to train their models. Suno also faces a class action by smaller artists who say the company stole their likenesses.
The Anthropic accusations include training on copyrighted Elvis songs, including “Can’t Help Falling in Love” and “Don’t Be Cruel,” one of his early hits.
