AI Companies Suno And Udio Face Copyright Lawsuits From Music Industry Giants

AI Companies Suno And Udio Face Copyright Lawsuits From Music Industry Giants

Major record labels Sony Music, Universal Music Group, and Warner Records filed lawsuits on Monday against artificial intelligence companies Suno and Udio, accusing them of committing mass copyright infringement by using the labels' recordings to train music-generating AI systems.

"The companies copied music without permission to teach their systems to create music that will directly compete with, cheapen, and ultimately drown out human artists' work," federal lawsuits filed against Udio in New York and Suno in Massachusetts allege.

"Our technology is transformative; it is designed to generate completely new outputs, not to memorise and regurgitate pre-existing content," Suno CEO Mikey Shulman said in a statement. Spokespeople for Udio did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the complaints.

The complaints detail instances where Suno and Udio users reportedly recreated elements from songs including The Temptations' "My Girl," Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas Is You," and James Brown's "I Got You (I Feel Good)," generating vocals that are "indistinguishable" from musicians such as Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen, and ABBA.

The labels seek statutory damages of up to $150,000 per song allegedly copied. Suno is accused of copying 662 songs, while Udio allegedly copied 1,670 songs. These lawsuits mark the first to target music-generating AI, following previous legal actions concerning text-based AI models used by chatbots.

According to the labels' complaints, Suno and Udio have been "deliberately evasive" about the material they used to train their technology, arguing that disclosing it would "admit willful copyright infringement on an almost unimaginable scale."

"Unlicensed services like Suno and Udio that claim it's 'fair' to copy an artist's life's work and exploit it for their own profit without consent or pay set back the promise of genuinely innovative AI for us all," said Mitch Glazier, CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America, in a statement