Reservoir sues Suno over 1,050 songs and Anthropic over 853 lyrics, from Joni Mitchell to Madonna

Reservoir has sued Suno over 1,050 of its songs and Anthropic over the lyrics to 853, in 2 complaints filed on Wednesday, October 21, 2026 in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. The songs run from Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” and Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” to Madonna’s “Papa Don’t Preach”.

The plaintiffs are Reservoir Media Management, its UK arm, and Shapiro, Bernstein & Co. Limited, which the UK arm owns outright. Both the Suno complaint and the Anthropic complaint add 2 DMCA claims on top of copyright infringement, and that’s how the maximum demand gets this big.

Anthropic told Billboard: “We disagree with the allegations and intend to defend this case vigorously.” Suno declined to comment, and no court has tested any of the claims yet.

What Reservoir says Suno did with 1,050 of its songs

Reservoir builds its Suno case on Suno’s own words. In the major-label lawsuit, Suno said its training data includes “essentially all music files of reasonable quality that are accessible on the open Internet.” Reservoir’s point is simple: its songs sit on every licensed streaming service, so they can’t have been left out.

Then it goes to the code. Citing 404 Media’s report on the Suno source code hack I covered in July, the complaint says “Both Sides Now”, Ben Harper’s “Diamonds on the Inside” and “Ring of Fire” show up in it by name, next to a YouTube Music workflow that saved 2,057,486 artist records.

As for how the audio got in, Reservoir says Suno ripped it from YouTube with a tool called YT-DLP, through proxy networks sold by Bright Data, and that the scraper skipped the headers and footers where songwriter credits sit. Suno has already admitted taking YouTube audio with YT-DLP in the label case.

The sharpest line in the complaint is about intent. Reservoir quotes Suno CEO Mikey Shulman saying “it’s not really enjoyable to make music now”, and concludes that Suno “was never meant to be a tool for artists to create music but was instead always meant to replace the artists” whose songs it copied.

What Reservoir says Anthropic’s Claude did with 853 lyrics

The Anthropic case is about words, not audio. Reservoir says Claude learned its lyrics from big text collections: Common Crawl, which it says picked them up from licensed lyric sites like Musixmatch and LyricFind, the Books3 book set, and The Pile, whose “YouTube Subtitles” slice comes from 173,536 videos.

It also leans on Bartz v. Anthropic, the authors’ case Anthropic settled for $1.5 billion, where a judge described Anthropic downloading pirate libraries over BitTorrent. Reservoir says some of those books contain its lyrics.

On credits, Reservoir says Anthropic tested 3 text-extraction tools, turned down one called jusText because it left copyright notices in, and picked one called Newspaper because it took them out.

Then comes the output claim. Reservoir says Claude Haiku 4.5 and Sonnet 5 tell users they can’t reproduce lyrics but still rewrite songs on request, and that Sonnet 5, asked to recreate songs “for a modern audience”, described its own work like this:

The footnote behind the “modern audience” example cites Round Hill’s August complaint and its examples: Claude’s versions of the Goo Goo Dolls’ “Iris”, James Brown’s “I Got You (I Feel Good)” and Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart”.

Whose songs are in Reservoir’s 1,050-song list against Suno?

I went through Exhibit A of the Suno complaint, the list of all 1,050 compositions with their copyright registration numbers. Joni Mitchell is credited on 149 of them, so roughly 1 in 7.

Behind her come Billy Strayhorn on 93, including “Lush Life” and “Take The A Train”, Ben Harper on 84, Sonny Rollins on 83, Joe Walsh on 53 and Mac Davis on 50. Miles Davis is on 37, “So What” among them.

Some of the famous names belong to the singers, not the writers. Exhibit A lists “Papa Don’t Preach” under Brian Elliot and “Ring of Fire” under June Carter and Merle Kilgore, because Reservoir is suing over the songs as written.

The Anthropic complaint has its own 853-work Exhibit A, but it isn’t on CourtListener yet, so I can’t tell you how much the 2 lists overlap.

How Reservoir’s claims against Suno and Anthropic add up to $337.8 million

Each complaint runs the same 3 counts, and US copyright law puts a price per song on each one:

• Copyright infringement: up to $150,000 per song when the infringement is willful.
• Circumvention (DMCA Section 1201): getting around a lock, like a login, a paywall or the rolling cipher YouTube uses to stop downloads. Up to $2,500 per violation.
• Stripped credits (DMCA Section 1202): removing the copyright management information, meaning the title, writer and publisher data attached to a song. Up to $25,000 per violation.

Reservoir counts 1 violation per song, so every song is worth up to $177,500. Times 1,050, that’s $186.4 million against Suno. Times 853, it’s $151.4 million against Anthropic, and Digital Music News rounded the pair to nearly $340 million.

One caveat: these are ceilings. Reservoir asks for actual damages and profits first, with statutory damages as the alternative, and a court would set the number.

Beyond money, both complaints ask the court to impound or destroy every copy of Reservoir’s songs, model weights included.

Who else is suing Suno and Anthropic over songs?

Reservoir’s lawyer is Richard S. Busch of Adams & Reese, who won the Blurred Lines case for Marvin Gaye’s family. This is his third suit against Suno in the same court since August, after Round Hill Music and Gerencia 360.

That’s why Bright Data isn’t a defendant here. Reservoir still says Suno used its proxies, but it sued Suno alone.

Anthropic’s list is longer. Reservoir’s complaint counts at least 5 other suits over musical compositions pending in the same court, including Concord v. Anthropic, where Judge Eumi Lee heard the fair use motions on the same day Reservoir filed. Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell sued Anthropic on August 28.

Reservoir’s founder and CEO explained why she filed in a statement to Music Business Worldwide:

“

As AI continues to reshape the music landscape, its innovative technology must not be built on the exploitation of intellectual property in ways that violate the rights of creators.

When they were filed, the Suno case went to Magistrate Judge Nathanael M. Cousins and the Anthropic case to Magistrate Judge Alex G. Tse. Neither docket shows an answer or a hearing date yet, and I’m logging both on the new Reservoir lawsuit tracker.

Until a judge rules, “Both Sides Now” sits on both sides of this fight: on Reservoir’s list of 1,050, and, by Reservoir’s account, inside Suno’s code.