A music industry body has sued two leading artificial intelligence developers, accusing them of stealing artists’ work to train AI to generate music. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) filed copyright infringement cases against the developers of Suno and Udio, alongside fellow plaintiffs Sony Music Entertainment, UMG Recordings, Inc., and Warner Records, Inc.—record labels that hold the rights to sound recordings they claim Suno and Udio infringed.
The lawsuits claim that AI companies lifting copyrighted music to “saturate the market with machine-generated content that will directly compete with, cheapen and ultimately drown out the genuine sound recordings on which [the services were] built.” Several high-profile songs and artists are cited as circumstantial evidence. Suno and Udio allegedly generated songs that mimic the voices of Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and ABBA; the producer tags of Cash Money AP and Jason Derulo; and music of Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” the Beach Boys’ “I Get Around,” Green Day’s “American Idiot,” among others. Coverage of Metro Boomin’s viral song “BBL Drizzy,” which mimics Drake’s voice with Udio AI, is cited in the Udio lawsuit.
“There is nothing that exempts AI technology from copyright law or that excuses AI companies from playing by the rules,” reads one of the complaints. Both lawsuits seek declarations that the two services infringed plaintiffs’ copyrighted sound recordings, as well as injunctions barring the AI services from doing the same again and damages for the infringements that have already occurred.
“The music community has embraced AI and we are already partnering and collaborating with responsible developers to build sustainable AI tools centered on human creativity that put artists and songwriters in charge,” Mitch Glazier, the chairman and CEO of RIAA, said in a statement. “But we can only succeed if developers are willing to work together with us. 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.”
The case against Suno AI was filed in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts, while the lawsuit against Uncharted Labs, Inc.—which develops Udio AI—was filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.