Eminem’s publisher has sued Suno, the AI music generator, claiming the company trained its models on 269 of the rapper’s songs without a licence and then let users generate tracks that reproduce his lyrics and voice. Eight Mile Style filed the case late on Friday in federal court in San Francisco, seeking more than $41 million in damages. The same day, the owners of Elvis Presley’s name and likeness filed a separate suit against Suno over AI voice cloning.
What the lawsuit claims
The 32-page complaint says Suno built its business on copyright infringement ‘at a scale heretofore unseen,’ and that it made illicit copies of millions of copyrighted musical works to train its models. Eight Mile Style owns and administers nearly 270 Eminem compositions, including ‘Lose Yourself,’ ‘Without Me,’ ”Till I Collapse,’ ‘The Real Slim Shady’ and ‘Stan.’
The publisher says Suno’s service generated tracks that reproduce Eminem’s lyrics word for word, including versions of ‘Lose Yourself,’ ‘The Real Slim Shady’ and ‘Houdini.’ One cited track, titled ‘Slim shady x Rosefalls,’ uses an AI-generated image of Eminem as its cover art and vocals the publisher says are ‘clearly derived from Eminem’s actual voice.’
The complaint puts a number on the claim. Under US copyright law, a rights holder can seek up to $150,000 per work for wilful infringement, which comes to $40.4 million across the 269 songs. Eight Mile Style also seeks $672,000 over digital copyright information it says Suno removed, taking the total sought past $41 million.
Suno’s guardrails, and how the suit says they fail
Suno says it does not allow prompts naming specific artists or songs, and it screens uploaded audio and lyrics with third-party providers. The lawsuit argues those guardrails are easily bypassed: users cannot type ‘Eminem,’ but they can prompt the service for a ‘Slim Shady’-style track with descriptive terms such as ‘aggressive rap, rapid-fire flow, dark humor, male rapper, horrorcore.’
The complaint also points to leaked Suno source code, reportedly obtained by an online hacker, which it says shows the company scraped Eminem’s music and lyrics from sites including YouTube and Genius. Suno has previously disclosed in court that its model was trained on ‘essentially all music files of reasonable quality that are accessible on the open Internet.’
A Suno spokesperson told the Detroit Free Press on Saturday that the company exists ‘to help people create new, original music, not to trade on anyone’s name or likeness,’ and that it prohibits unauthorised use of an artist’s work. The spokesperson said Suno keeps strengthening its safeguards, and Eminem himself is not a party to the suit.
A wider fight over AI music
The Eminem case is not Suno’s first court fight. The Recording Industry Association of America sued the company in June 2024 on behalf of major record labels. Since then, BMG and Warner Music Group have struck licensing deals with Suno, while Universal Music Group — Eminem’s record company — remains a plaintiff in that case.
The copyright question runs wider than music. Wikipedia’s parent drew its own line on AI training last month, refusing to let its content feed AI models without terms — a sign that rights holders across industries are choosing their ground.
The Presley suit, filed the same day by Elvis Presley Enterprises and other rights holders, goes further: its 51-page complaint accuses Suno of cloning the singer’s voice and invokes Tennessee’s ELVIS Act, which protects a person’s name, image and likeness. Variety reported the filing; the two suits put the industry’s two biggest voices at the centre of one day’s litigation.
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What makes this filing land harder than the earlier label suits is the evidence it claims to show. A prompt that cannot name Eminem but still produces his lyrics and a voice ‘clearly derived’ from his own is a guardrail failure, not a policy debate — and Suno’s own court disclosure hands the publisher its central exhibit.
The split inside the industry matters as much as the suit. BMG and Warner chose licensing deals; Universal is still suing, and now its publisher has filed separately. If Eight Mile Style wins, or settles on its own terms, the price of training on unlicensed music gets a number — and every other AI music company will be reading it.
Why It Matters
For Suno, the case tests whether its safeguards are enough when the output itself is the infringement. For the music business, it is the clearest test yet of whether training on unlicensed songs carries a real price: $150,000 a song, across 269 songs, is a number the whole industry can do the arithmetic on.
AI companies are facing this question in court on several fronts at once. Parents have already sued OpenAI over ChatGPT’s advice and sued Google over Gemini’s chats with a teenager, and the wider fight over AI training and copyright is still without a settled answer.
Background
Suno launched in 2023 and lets users generate songs from text and image prompts, on free and paid tiers. The industry’s first major suit came in June 2024, when the Recording Industry Association of America sued on behalf of the major labels — a case still running, with two labels now licensed and one still suing.
Source: the Detroit Free Press report
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