Elvis Presley's estate and music rights holders have sued AI music company Suno, accusing it of letting users generate songs that imitate the singer's voice and of training its technology on hundreds of his songs without permission. The lawsuit was filed on Friday, 6 November, in a US federal court in Northern California by Elvis Presley Enterprises, affiliates of Authentic Brands Group and several music publishers.

Suno disputes the claims, saying its platform is designed for creating original music and blocks prompts that name specific performers or songs.

The case makes 2 separate claims. The first is about Elvis's voice. It relies on Tennessee's 2024 ELVIS Act, short for the Ensuring Likeness Voice and Image Security Act, a law written to protect performers from unauthorised use of their voice and likeness, including AI imitations.

The rights holders say Suno's safeguards do not work: users can still get Presley-like vocals even though prompts using artists' names are restricted, and in one recent example, a prompt that only mentioned Elvis in the song lyrics produced an imitation of his voice.

The second claim is about the songs. The complaint lists 859 compositions it says were used without permission to train Suno's technology, including "Can't Help Falling in Love" and "Don't Be Cruel". The publishers calculate potential copyright damages of up to $ 128.85 million, about R2.1 billion, and seek more than $ 50 million, about R823 million, on the voice and publicity claims. These are amounts claimed in the lawsuit, not damages a court has awarded. Suno is fighting on several fronts.

On the same day, Eight Mile Style, which controls much of Eminem's catalogue, filed its own copyright suit against it, and Suno is also defending a case brought by musician Jason Isbell and others, which it has asked a judge to dismiss on free speech grounds.

The same Presley rights holders sued Anthropic, the maker of the Claude AI models, in October, alleging it used 274 of his compositions to train its models without permission and seeking up to $ 41.1 million, about R676 million.

Law Commentary's Camila Curcio reported the filing, noting that whether a general-purpose music generator falls under the ELVIS Act is one of the questions the case could answer. It also covered the earlier lawsuit against Anthropic over Presley's songs, and a separate case in which music publisher Reservoir is suing both Suno and Anthropic over songs associated with Madonna, Johnny Cash and Joni Mitchell.

Most AI music lawsuits so far have been about training: whether a company can learn from copyrighted songs without paying for them. That question is still unsettled. The voice claim is different, and potentially more dangerous for AI music companies, because it does not depend on how a model was trained.

It asks a simpler question: does the output sound like a real, identifiable person who never agreed to it? If courts say yes, AI music tools will need far stronger protection against imitation than prompt filters.

South Africa has no law like the ELVIS Act aimed specifically at AI voice imitation, and as we found when Samro introduced AI disclosure rules, local rules for AI music are still being written. For businesses using AI to make jingles, ads or background music, the practical lesson is to avoid anything that sounds like a recognisable artist, because that is where the legal risk is growing fastest.

You might also like our piece on Coral Hart's AI-written books, AI-built software clones, and Claude vs ChatGPT in SA.

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