Music publisher Reservoir filed two copyright lawsuits on Oct. 21 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, one against AI music company Suno and one against San Francisco-based Anthropic.

The Suno case

  • Reservoir says Suno trained on 1,050 of its compositions without permission, including Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now" and Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire."
  • Pleaded figures across copyright and DMCA counts total just over $186 million.
  • The complaint cites Suno's licensing deals with Warner Music, BMG and Believe as proof a licensing market exists.

The Anthropic case

  • Reservoir alleges Anthropic copied lyrics from 853 compositions to train Claude, and that Claude reproduces them.
  • Pleaded figures total just over $151.4 million.
  • Anthropic is already defending music suits from Concord, UMPG, ABKCO, BMG, Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell.

Both suits seek statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work and the destruction of copies held in training data and model weights.