Reservoir Sues Suno Over 1,050 Works and Anthropic Over Lyrics from 853 Works
Key Facts
Reservoir Media filed two separate lawsuits in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on October 21, 2026, accusing Suno and Anthropic of using musical works without permission to train their models. The Suno complaint says the company copied 1,050 musical works to train music-generation models, while the Anthropic complaint accuses the company of copying lyrics from 853 works to train Claude models. The disputed material differs between the lawsuits: the first focuses on musical compositions and the second on song lyrics. Music Business Worldwide published details of the two complaints filed in federal court. The accusations remain allegations in lawsuits, and the available information contains no court rulings on them.
The lists of works cited in the complaints include songs by Joni Mitchell, Johnny Cash and Madonna, including "Both Sides Now," "Ring of Fire" and "Papa Don’t Preach." Reservoir links the use of these works to the need to obtain a license before including music or lyrics in model-training data. The company seeks actual damages and the defendant’s profits or, alternatively, statutory damages of up to 150,000 dollars for each work found to have been willfully infringed. It also seeks injunctions concerning unauthorized copying, including copies stored in training-data sets. These are claims in the complaints, not damages awarded by the court.
The Suno complaint bases its allegations on the method of data collection, saying Reservoir claims the company used Bright Data tools and services to bypass access controls for works published on streaming platforms and lyrics sites. The complaint also alleges that copyright management information was removed from the works. Reservoir says a data-collection pipeline from YouTube Music saved 2,057,486 artist records, while a Genius pipeline recorded 6,980,653 successful processing operations for song pages. The complaint attributed these figures to workflow logs it says it reviewed. Reservoir’s chief executive and co-founder said the company would pursue legal action against platforms when it believes its works have been exploited without authorization, adding: "When we believe our works have been used without permission, we will hold AI platforms legally accountable to ensure those rights are respected."
Reservoir places the dispute in the context of commercial arrangements to license music and recording rights for training. The Suno complaint cites licensing agreements the platform signed with Warner Music Group, BMG and Believe, saying the agreements demonstrate a market for licensing training data. Warner Music Group reached a settlement with Suno in November 2025, then BMG and Believe signed licensing agreements with the platform. Those agreements came before Suno launched its v6 models on September 9, 2026. Suno said the training data for these models does not include data from Universal Music Group or Sony Music Entertainment, and that the new models were trained from scratch on data different from that used for previous releases, including data licensed from partners and user preferences.
The lawsuits come as Reservoir continues to report growth in its music business. In the quarter ended June 30, 2026, the company reported revenue of 41.5 million dollars, up 12% year over year, while recorded-music revenue rose 35%. The company had kept its fiscal 2027 guidance at revenue of between 186 and 191 million dollars and adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization of between 75 and 79 million dollars. In trading on October 22, Reservoir Media, listed under the ticker RSVR, closed at 9.6 dollars. The available data did not include the stock’s daily trading range.