On June 24, 2024, the Recording Industry Association of America announced that the major record companies had filed copyright-infringement lawsuits against two AI music-generation services, Suno and Udio. The RIAA called them “landmark cases for responsible AI.” One suit was filed against Suno, Inc. in the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts; the other against Uncharted Labs, Inc. (the maker of Udio) in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. The plaintiffs were Sony Music Entertainment, UMG Recordings, Inc., and Warner Records, Inc.
The complaints alleged that the services engaged in “copying and ingesting massive amounts of data to ‘train’ a software ‘model’” using the labels’ copyrighted sound recordings without permission. RIAA Chief Legal Officer Ken Doroshow described them as “straightforward cases of copyright infringement involving unlicensed copying of sound recordings on a massive scale.” The labels asked the courts to declare that the services infringed their recordings, to enjoin future infringement, and to award damages for infringements that had already occurred.
Unlike text and image cases that focus on books or pictures, these suits put the training of generative music models at the center, and specifically the use of master sound recordings - the recorded performances owned by labels - rather than the underlying musical compositions owned by publishers. As of the verified date the cases remained ongoing.
Why business readers should care: the Suno and Udio suits extended the AI-training copyright fight into music, brought by an industry with a long history of aggressive copyright enforcement. They tested whether ingesting commercial recordings to train a generative model is infringement or fair use - the same core question as in book and image cases such as 2025-bartz-v-anthropic - but with the added commercial weight of the recorded-music catalogs, and they ran in parallel with the publishers’ separate lyrics case at 2024-concord-v-anthropic.