Elvis Presley Enterprises sues Suno over AI voice imitation, pleading $202M

Elvis Presley Enterprises sued Suno in the US District Court for the Northern District of California on Friday, November 6, together with a group of song owners. The pleaded figures come to just over $202 million, before any tripling or punitive damages, Music Business Worldwide reported.

The complaint has five claims. Two come from Tennessee law: the ELVIS Act and the state’s common-law right of publicity. Three are federal: copyright infringement, circumventing access controls on streaming and lyrics platforms, and stripping songwriter and publisher credits. “Suno is the embodiment of why the ELVIS Act (Ensuring Likeness, Voice, and Image Security) was so essentially required,” the complaint says.

A provision aimed at the tool

Tennessee Governor Bill Lee signed the ELVIS Act on March 21, 2024, and it took effect on July 1. It added voice to the state’s right-of-publicity statute, which already covered name, photograph and likeness. A voice is a sound “readily identifiable and attributable to a particular individual,” real or simulated.

Anyone who knowingly publishes or makes available an unauthorized voice or likeness can be sued. A separate provision covers anyone who makes available an algorithm, software or tool whose “primary purpose or function” is producing a particular, identifiable person’s voice or likeness, again if they know the use was unauthorized. Presley’s side is suing under both. The statute doesn’t define “primary purpose or function,” so a court will have to decide whether a music generator qualifies.

The two sides describe the product differently. The complaint says: “The primary purpose of Suno’s technology and tools is to produce particular identifiable individual’s voices for such distribution and availability to the public.” Suno’s motion in a separate Boston case says its purpose “is to create new music, not to replicate specific creative expression that already exists, such as a particular melody, a sample of someone else’s recording, or the identifiable sound of an actual person’s voice.”

The complaint also goes beyond prompts. It alleges that Suno treats Presley’s name as “a retrieval key for a set of performer-specific representations,” and that Suno Pro subscribers can save a “voice” and reuse it. One cited track, Zeon of Mine, says it was “Made from” what looks like a saved voice titled “Elvis.” Another, Elvis in The Jailhouse Rock, had more than 125,000 plays and was still live when the complaint was written. The filing adds that Suno’s own “For You” recommendations served up two tracks using Presley’s voice.

One example involves no name prompt. The complaint says that as recently as October 7, Suno generated two tracks titled He Is Still The King from lyrics alone, which spelled out Presley’s name with spaces between the letters. Each, it alleges, “contained a copy of Elvis’ unmistakable and iconic voice.”

The same fight is already running in Boston

On November 3, three days before the Presley filing, Suno asked US District Judge Angel Kelley in Boston to dismiss a proposed class action from Jason Isbell and three other musicians. That case also includes a Tennessee claim.

Suno’s position there is that typing an artist’s name into a prompt is “at most a use of the artist’s name by the user – not by Suno,” and that “secondary liability for a right of publicity claim is not a recognized concept in the law.” The Presley complaint takes the opposite position: “Plaintiff’s claims are for Suno’s own conduct, not any act by a user.” Isbell’s complaint made the same point.

Suno also argues that Isbell never alleged an output with a voice “readily identifiable” as his. The Presley complaint quotes that language back and says its examples meet the standard.

A Suno spokesperson told The Verge that the company prohibits unauthorized use of an artist’s work and does not allow prompts for specific artists’ names and songs. In its October 20 answer to the second lawsuit brought against it by UMG and Sony, Suno admitted that “as of January 2026, users may include artist names in their prompts.” It denied that those prompts produce outputs “without first converting the artist name to a style description.”

Tennessee law in a California court

The suit was filed in California, but Elvis Presley Enterprises argues Tennessee law governs because Presley was domiciled there when he died at Graceland in 1977. Under California’s conflict-of-laws test, it says, Tennessee has the “greatest governmental interest” in his likeness rights. The complaint also cites the state’s Personal Rights Protection Act of 1984, which it says made Tennessee “one of the first states to legislatively recognize posthumous publicity rights by statute.”

On the ELVIS Act claim, the plaintiff puts actual damages and Suno’s profits at an amount “believed to exceed $50 million.” It also seeks triple damages and attorney fees, which the Act allows only when the rights of a “member of the armed forces” are knowingly infringed. Presley’s side says he qualifies because he served in the US Army from 1958 to 1960, and the statute covers a service member who “is in, or was called into, active service.” The statute doesn’t say whether that reaches someone who left active duty 17 years before his death.

The Act also lets a court issue injunctions and order confiscation of instrumentalities used in a violation, and Presley’s side asks for that along with impoundment and destruction of infringing materials. On the copyright claims, the plaintiffs want all unauthorized copies of their songs handed over, including those in training datasets and model weights. The complaint calls the harm ongoing, saying each new model version and generated output is a separate appropriation of Presley’s identity.

The case was assigned to Magistrate Judge Joseph C. Spero on November 9, and Suno has not yet responded. In Boston, the Isbell plaintiffs have until December 1 to answer Suno’s motion to dismiss. None of the allegations in the Presley complaint has been tested in court.