On Friday, November 6, 2026, two of the most famous names in music went to war with the same AI company on the same day, in the same court, with the same lawyers. The Elvis Suno lawsuit began when the rights holders behind Elvis Presley sued Suno in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California; Eight Mile Style, publisher of 269 Eminem compositions, filed its own case there the same day.
Both suits accuse Suno of building its business on other people’s songs. But the Presley case goes further than copyright: it tests a law named after Elvis Presley himself, and the estate is asking a court to use it against the company behind the generator, not the person typing the prompt.
Nothing has been decided: Suno has not yet answered either complaint, and no judge has ruled on any claim. Everything about what Suno did, in this story, is an allegation made by the people suing it.
A law with his name on it
Tennessee’s Ensuring Likeness, Voice and Image Security Act — the ELVIS Act — was signed by Governor Bill Lee on March 21, 2024, passed unanimously, and took effect on July 1, 2024, adding the voice to a 1984 law protecting name, photograph and likeness.
The complaint makes a point of the name. It says the state asked Presley’s rights holders for permission before naming the act after him — “something Defendant Suno, Inc., … does not know how to do.” That detail is the spine of the case: the ELVIS Act adds a clause for anyone who makes available a tool whose “primary purpose” is producing an identifiable person’s voice without permission, letting the estate aim at the company behind the tool, not only its users. The complaint says plainly that its claims are about “Suno’s own conduct, not any act by a user”.
The Presley complaint — case 3:26-cv-13398, a 51-page filing demanding a jury trial — was brought by Elvis Presley Enterprises, ABG EPE IP, Raleigh Music Publishing and other rights holders. Its schedule lists 859 songs, among them “Can’t Help Falling in Love”, “All Shook Up”, “Don’t Be Cruel” and “If I Can Dream”. Not all of the 859 are Elvis recordings.
What the estate says Suno did
The complaint alleges Suno trained its models on Elvis’ voice and built tools designed to generate clones — including, it says, “one specific prompt category: ‘Elvis Presley Style'” — shared a video tutorial on cloning Elvis, and that the generator will produce his voice without being asked.
The example the complaint leans on is dated October 7, 2026: a prompt made only of lyrics — spelling out “E L V I S P R E S L E Y” and ending “But he is still the King” — produced two tracks called “He Is Still The King”, each with what the complaint calls “a copy of Elvis’ unmistakable and iconic voice”. Richard Busch, the Presley plaintiffs’ lawyer, writes that those tracks “are NOT examples of Elvis Presley singing. They are synthetic and unlicensed uses of Elvis’ voice and likeness.”
The filing attaches 47 recordings in four exhibits: five copying both his voice and his songs, 33 using his voice, and nine copying his songs. One, “Elvis in The Jailhouse Rock”, is said to be live on Suno with more than 125,000 plays. Three days before the filing, in a November 3 motion to dismiss a suit brought by Jason Isbell and other musicians, Suno told a Massachusetts court its outputs “do not replicate the auditory characteristics of any real artist’s voice to the point that someone would confuse a Suno creation with one actually sung by a particular famous musician”. The Presley complaint quotes that line and calls it “unequivocally false”.
Busch puts the stakes bluntly: “The next Elvis won’t pick up a guitar.” Suno, he writes, aims “to make human creativity obsolete, coldly replicating without a license in seconds what takes years to learn”.
The price tag — as asked, not as awarded
The money is striking — and only an asking price. The plaintiffs seek up to $150,000 for each song wilfully infringed, which at the maximum would come to almost $129 million, plus treble and punitive damages under Tennessee law. On the ELVIS Act side, the estate puts its damages at more than $50 million and asks for that amount tripled.
The reason is the most unusual paragraph in the filing: Elvis served in the U.S. Army from about March 1958 to March 1960, and the complaint argues that makes him a “member of the armed forces” under the law’s enhanced-damages provision. No court has ruled on that argument. It also asks for impoundment or destruction of every unauthorized copy, including copies in “training datasets, internal repositories, model weights, and server infrastructure” — a request that would reach into the model itself.
The Eminem suit, filed the same day
The second case, Eight Mile Style and Martin Affiliated v. Suno (3:26-cv-13399), is a 32-page complaint over 269 Eminem compositions, including “Lose Yourself”, “Without Me”, “Till I Collapse”, “The Real Slim Shady” and “Stan”. Eminem himself is not a plaintiff.
Where the Presley suit is about a voice, the Eminem suit is about a name filter that does not hold. You cannot type “Eminem” into Suno, but Eight Mile Style says a string of style words gets you a Slim Shady-style track anyway. The complaint points to a Suno track called “Slim shady x Rosefalls” with vocals “clearly derived from Eminem’s actual voice”, and to outputs with verbatim or near-verbatim lyrics from “Lose Yourself”, “The Real Slim Shady” and “Houdini”. The Verge’s account adds that the complaint says Suno “has declined to implement appropriate safeguards” even after being notified of infringement.
The damages math is arithmetic, not a valuation. Eight Mile Style asks for $150,000 for each of the 269 songs, or $40.35 million, plus $672,500 for circumventing protection measures and a further $6.725 million for removing copyright management information: about $47.7 million in all. Some outlets report “more than $41 million”, counting only the statutory damages and anti-circumvention claim — either way, a demand, not an award.
What Suno says
Suno’s position, as stated to the Detroit Free Press, CBS News and Variety: it “exists to help people create new, original music, not to trade on anyone’s name or likeness, and we prohibit any unauthorized use of an artist’s work.” It bars prompts naming specific artists or songs, screens uploads through third parties, and that its training is protected by fair use. Both complaints quote Suno’s court disclosure that its model learned from “essentially all music files of reasonable quality that are accessible on the open Internet”. The fair-use question stays unresolved.
The lawyer who keeps filing
Richard Busch of Adams & Reese, the lawyer behind both suits, has now filed five cases against Suno in 12 weeks; the same Elvis owners sued Anthropic over 274 songs in October 2026, and Busch also filed Reservoir Media’s case against Suno. The two filings share the same team and court — and two theories, copyright in the songs and a voice law aimed at the tool. Suno already faces lawsuits from Sony, UMG, Isbell and Reservoir Media, while Warner settled its suit and signed a licensing partnership in November 2025.
What a court still has to decide in the Elvis Suno lawsuit
The Presley suit tests questions still unresolved in this litigation. Will a California federal court apply Tennessee’s ELVIS Act to a dispute filed there? Does the act’s tool provision reach a general-purpose music generator, or only tools whose primary purpose is cloning a specific voice? And does Suno’s generator produce Presley’s voice unprompted, or only when users steer it there?
And then there is the outcome that would settle the least: if Suno settles and licenses, as Warner did, the deal would show only what the catalogue is worth in a negotiation — not what the law protects. A ruling, by contrast, would say whether the company behind the generator pays for the clone. A broad ruling could also raise the value of the catalogues the plaintiffs control — whether that commercial interest also motivates the suits is an open question, not an established fact. Whether Suno meets the tool provision and can be held liable is the question his estate is now asking a court to decide.
