Elvis Presley Enterprises voice deepfake — Nov 2025

On November 6, 2025, Elvis Presley Enterprises and Eight Mile Style filed separate lawsuits against the AI music generator Suno in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. The plaintiffs allege that Suno trained its AI models on copyrighted recordings and enables users to generate synthetic audio that mimics the voices and likenesses of famous artists without authorization. Elvis Presley Enterprises, which owns the rights to Presley’s likeness, is seeking damages exceeding $202 million across various claims, including violations of Tennessee’s ELVIS Act. Eight Mile Style, representing hundreds of Eminem compositions, filed a separate suit seeking over $47.7 million in damages.

What happened

The lawsuits allege that Suno’s platform allows users to bypass internal guardrails designed to prevent the generation of specific artist voices and copyrighted songs. While Suno maintains that it prohibits prompts for specific artists and works to screen for misuse, the complaints provide evidence of users employing workarounds, such as spacing out letters in an artist's name, to generate tracks that mimic iconic voices. The Presley complaint cites at least 38 instances of synthetic outputs using Presley’s voice or likeness, including tracks generated from lyrics alone.

Beyond voice cloning, the plaintiffs accuse Suno of scraping copyrighted works on a massive scale, bypassing access controls, and stripping songwriter and publisher credits from training data. Eight Mile Style specifically alleges that Suno’s platform can generate verbatim lyrics from Eminem’s songs, citing leaked source code that reportedly contained scraped lyrics. Both filings argue that Suno’s business model relies on infringing upon intellectual property to gain a first-mover advantage in the AI market. The plaintiffs are seeking significant statutory damages, punitive damages, and court orders to force the destruction of unauthorized copies, including those embedded within Suno’s model weights and server infrastructure. Suno has denied these allegations, stating that its platform is intended to help users create original music and that it continues to strengthen its safeguards against potential misuse.