Another lawsuit over "who owns the songs AI has consumed" landed on two leading artificial intelligence companies on October 21. Music publisher Reservoir filed separate lawsuits in U.S. federal court, dragging both AI music generation company Suno and Anthropic, the company behind Claude, into court. The core allegations are highly consistent: both companies used copyrighted songs without authorization when training their own models, effectively turning other people's works into food for AI without obtaining a license or paying for it.
The tracks caught up in this lawsuit involve works by Madonna, Johnny Cash, Joni Mitchell, and a batch of other artists—these names alone show that what Reservoir has set its sights on is not some obscure catalog, but truly heavyweight copyright assets. For the publisher, the logic is straightforward: model capabilities are built by feeding on massive amounts of music data, and however much of that data consists of clearly priced copyrighted property, the AI companies must pay for every bit they "consume."
Facing the allegations, the two defendants responded with different temperatures. Anthropic explicitly stated that it disagrees with the claims and said it will actively defend itself in court, positioning itself to argue out the legality of its training data in court; Suno, meanwhile, has remained silent for now, making no public response to the lawsuit. As the tug-of-war over whether AI training constitutes "fair use" burns from academia all the way to federal courts, Reservoir's lawsuit merely turns another page in the ever-thickening, ever-clearer ledger between music copyright holders and generative AI companies.