Record Labels sue AI Startup Suno for pirating songs from YouTube to train its models
The fight between the music industry and AI startups just escalated.
Record labels are coming after Suno, the AI music generator that’s been making a lot of noise lately.
Universal, Sony, and Warner, backed by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), are accusing the startup company of outright stealing songs from YouTube to train its AI.
According to the lawsuit, Suno used “stream-ripping” tools to bypass YouTube’s protections and download copyrighted tracks. The labels say this wasn’t sloppy data gathering—it was intentional. They claim Suno built software specifically to break through YouTube’s locks and scrape decades of music from top artists worldwide.
Emmanuel Umahi
That’s where the law comes in. The RIAA says Suno violated YouTube’s rules and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which makes it illegal to break the digital locks that protect creative works. And the suit calls for $2,500 for every act of circumvention and up to $150,000 for each infringed song. That adds up quickly, and if the court agrees, the damages could reach into the tens or even hundreds of millions.
Suno, for its part, hasn’t been very clear about where its training data comes from. Like other AI companies, it argues that using copyrighted material to train an AI model counts as fair use, since the outputs are technically different from the originals. One court ruling has backed that idea, but there’s no firm consensus yet. The labels’ new complaint is designed to poke holes in that defense, pointing to research that suggests Suno didn’t just use copyrighted material, it obtained it illegally by breaking YouTube’s protections.
The timing matters. Courts are only just starting to wrestle with the question of whether AI companies can train on copyrighted works without permission. Other AI companies have already faced similar fights. Anthropic recently faced a $1.5 billion claim from publishers over book piracy, though that case is on hold. OpenAI is being sued by The New York Times and a coalition of authors, including George R.R. Martin and John Grisham, who argue its models were trained on their works without consent.
What makes the Suno case stand out is the YouTube connection. If the court decides that bypassing YouTube’s safeguards counts as piracy under the DMCA, it could set a precedent that affects not only music but also other industries like film and gaming, where Digital Rights Management (DRM) is used to block unauthorized copying.
In other words, this fight isn’t just about artists losing ground to AI. The labels are going after the way these tools are being built from the ground up. And depending on how it plays out, the rules of the AI industry could look very different when the dust settles.
Oyinebiladou Omemu
