The owners of Elvis Presley’s music have sued Suno, an artificial intelligence (AI) music platform, in a United States case over AI-generated songs that imitate Presley’s voice. The complaint takes a different legal route from the copyright claims that major labels and other creatives have pursued for years.
What the lawsuit claims#
The case was filed on Friday (Nov. 6). It alleges that Suno broke the law by enabling its users to produce AI-generated songs that clone Presley’s iconic voice.
“All of the humanity, history, despair and triumph that constitutes Elvis’ identity was stolen,” the case claims, “and is stored on servers and harnessed by Suno to make massive amounts of money.”
Presley is among the most famous recording artists in history. The suit adds a high-profile name to a growing list of challenges against AI companies.
A wider wave of AI litigation#
Lawsuits against Suno and other AI labs are not new. Since ChatGPT rose to prominence in late 2022, dozens of cases have been filed by authors, newspapers, visual artists and others who argue that AI is taking from real people.
Many of these disputes centre on AI training, meaning the use of millions of unlicensed works to train models. Plaintiffs contend that those inputs are covered by federal copyright and that exploiting them amounts to industrial-scale infringement.
The music industry has been involved from the start:
- 2023: Publishers sue Anthropic over lyrics used to train Claude.
- 2024: The three major labels file similar cases against Suno and Udio.
- Since then: BMG, Round Hill and Reservoir have filed their own cases.
- September: Universal Music and Sony Music file an updated, more aggressive case against Suno.
How the Elvis case differs#
Like the label cases, the Elvis case invokes copyright and the use of Presley’s songs as training inputs. Its central focus, however, is publicity rights: state-level protections that shield a person’s name, image and likeness from commercial exploitation.
Jason Isbell and others sued Suno this summer in a class action over alleged violations of their likenesses. That case centres more on claims that an artist’s overall identity has been encoded into the AI model, and that their name can be used to prompt Suno to create similar music.
The Elvis case instead accuses Suno directly of creating new songs that illegally reproduce “the signature and recognizable aspects” of Presley’s “distinguished voice.” The plaintiffs’ lawyers point to video exhibits showing Suno’s platform playing songs with a voice that sounds like Presley’s.
“Those … are NOT examples of Elvis Presley singing. They are synthetic and unlicensed uses of Elvis’ voice and likeness,” the lawsuit reads. “There are hundreds to thousands more like it.”
Legal protections and what comes next#
Copyright cases such as those filed by the major labels are still likely to be the main battleground. AI labs have stated in court filings and regulatory disclosures that current models would essentially not be feasible if they had to pay for the millions of training inputs used to create them.
The Elvis case invokes Tennessee’s ELVIS (Ensuring Likeness Voice and Image Security) Act, a state law enacted in 2024 to address the rise of AI. No equivalent protection exists at the US federal level, where lawmakers have tried and failed for three years to pass the NO FAKES Act, which would ban digital replicas of someone’s voice or visual likeness.
Without such laws, artists including Taylor Swift, the Backstreet Boys and Lionel Richie have sought to register trademarks on their voices. Experts say those efforts face serious challenges.
If the Elvis case succeeds, it could give individual artists a new route to challenge AI models that mimic their voices, one of the technology’s most contested applications. It could also give musicians leverage in negotiations over the AI licensing deals that labels have begun signing over the past year. The case will test how far existing laws can restrain AI companies from using someone’s voice.
