• Early success and rapid growth
• Labels escalate to mass copyright suits
• Allegations of “stream ripping” and DMCA violations
• AI firms’ defense and unresolved legal questions

Record Labels Sue AI Music Generators Suno and Udio Over Copyright AI music start-ups Suno and Udio are facing a pivotal legal and business clash, as explosive growth in generative music collides with a full-scale copyright offensive from the world’s biggest record labels.

§Early success and rapid growth

Suno quickly emerged as one of the most prominent AI music generators, offering text‑to‑song tools and even integrating into Microsoft’s Copilot platform. By its latest funding round, the company had raised $250 million and was “valued at $2.45 billion in [its] latest funding round as lawsuits loom,” marking a jump from about $500 million the year before.

Udio, meanwhile, drew public attention when its technology powered “BBL Drizzy,” a viral AI track that became “one of the more notable examples of AI music going viral.”

§Labels escalate to mass copyright suits

On June 24, a coalition of labels including Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Records filed lawsuits against both Suno and Udio, accusing them of violating copyright “en masse” by using artists’ work “without consent” to train their models. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) brought the cases, seeking up to $150,000 per infringed work plus additional fees.

RIAA chief legal officer Ken Doroshow called them “straightforward cases of copyright infringement involving unlicensed copying of sound recordings on a massive scale,” arguing that Suno and Udio are “attempting to hide the full scope of their infringement rather than putting their services on a sound and lawful footing.”

§Allegations of “stream ripping” and DMCA violations

The labels later escalated their complaint against Suno, alleging the startup “knowingly pirated songs from YouTube” to train its models. The amended filing claims Suno “employed code to access, extract, copy, and download” copyrighted works and circumvented YouTube’s “rolling cipher” encryption, characterizing this as unlawful “stream ripping” that violates the anti‑circumvention provisions of Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

§AI firms’ defense and unresolved legal questions

Suno has argued that training on copyrighted material is protected by fair use and maintains that its system generates original songs rather than memorizing or reproducing recordings. Both Suno and Udio have refused to fully disclose their training data, calling it “confidential business information,” a stance the labels say underscores the alleged misuse.

With no specific DMCA exception for AI training and only a patchwork of early court rulings on AI and fair use, the outcome of these cases could set a critical precedent for how creative industries and AI music companies coexist.

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