Suno Smacked With $285M Lawsuit Over Hip-Hop Producer Tags

Music publisher Reservoir sought more than $285 million from Suno and Anthropic in two new AI lawsuits, including one targeting copies of rap producer tags.

Those tags serve as a producer’s signature on a song. Reservoir alleged that “Suno has output ‘producer tags’ which are an integral musical part of songs throughout the Hip-Hop and rap genres” in its complaint.

The claim goes beyond which songs Suno used to train its system. Reservoir also challenged what the tool creates when a user asks it to make music.

The Suno suit covered 1,050 works. Reservoir claimed the company split songs into voice and backing tracks, then used those parts and cover versions to train its tools.

Oracle’s earlier customer interview featured Suno CEO Mikey Shulman discussing the music tool.

The other case focused on lyrics and Claude, Anthropic’s chatbot.

Reservoir listed 853 works and claimed Claude could copy lyrics or make new versions that still took protected parts of songs. It said filters meant to stop that copying had failed.

Reservoir also accused Anthropic of keeping copies of its works in a library for future use.

When choosing how to extract text, the suit alleged, “Anthropic selected the one that more aggressively removed author and publisher identifiers over alternatives that would have preserved such information.”

The copyright claims sought $157.5 million from Suno and $127.95 million from Anthropic.

The suits sought more money over alleged breaches of access controls and the removal of rights information, plus orders to stop the copying and destroy unlicensed copies.