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Amid the astronomical rise of AI-generated music, one company has simultaneously become the most popular platform for AI-based music-making and the most common target of criticism for its many opponents: Suno.
According to hacked data obtained by 404 Media, Suno appears to have scraped millions of songs, lyrics and podcasts from various services across the internet, including YouTube Music, Deezer, Genius and numerous stock music libraries.
A hacker working under the pseudonym Ellie.191 reached out to 404 Media to share data on Suno’s training libraries obtained by hacking source code from 2023 and 2024. The material details the vast scale of Suno’s alleged scraping of copyrighted music, which is the subject of multiple ongoing lawsuits from major record companies.
Datasets suggest that Suno scraped 113,879 hours of material from YouTube Music, 62,117 hours from stock music library Pond5, 12,287 hours from Deezer and 17,615 hours from Genius
According to one file in the hacked data, Suno has lifted at least “2,013,545 music clips” from YouTube Music, while another lists various datasets created by Suno which suggest that it scraped 113,879 hours of material from YouTube Music, 62,117 hours from stock music library Pond5, 12,287 hours from Deezer and 17,615 hours from Genius, among other platforms. (Though Genius doesn’t host audio recordings, Apple Music subscribers can play songs through the website.)
The hacked data also suggests that Suno trained its vocal generation models on acapella versions of songs on YouTube and attempted to download around 1 million hours of podcasts with the assistance of the online service PodcastIndex.
Launched in 2023, Suno is a generative AI music platform that has built a user base of over two million paid subscribers and recently raised more than $400 million in funding, at a valuation of $5.4 billion. The company is currently embroiled in a number of legal disputes, including a copyright lawsuit from major record companies represented by the RIAA.
Filed in 2024, the lawsuit alleges that Suno engaged in “wilful copyright infringement on an almost unimaginable scale” by “copying decades worth of the world’s most popular sound recordings” to train its AI models.
“To make matters worse,” the RIAA says, “Suno obtained those copies in the first instance by unlawfully ‘stream ripping’ them from the popular streaming platform YouTube, and circumventing the technological measures designed specifically to prevent such unauthorized copying.”
Suno has previously admitted that its training data “includes essentially all music files of reasonable quality that are accessible on the open internet”, but has argued that copying music for the purpose of training an AI model should be legally protected under fair use, a doctrine of US copyright law that allows limited and transformative use of copyrighted material without permission in certain circumstances.
In a blog post shared in 2024, Suno CEO Mikey Shulman maintained that “learning is not infringing”, comparing Suno training its models on copyrighted material to “a kid learning to write new rock songs by listening religiously to rock music”.
A spokesperson for Suno told 404 Media: “As we have stated in public filings and disclosures, Suno’s AI models have been trained on publicly available music files and related metadata accessible on third-party websites on the open Internet.” The spokesperson also emphasized that the company’s goal has “always been to help people create original new music, not replicate someone else’s”.
In November 2025, Warner Music became the first of the “big three” major record companies to settle its lawsuit with Suno, entering into a licensing partnership that will allow Suno users to create AI-generated music using the voices, likenesses and names of artists that give their permission.
“Artists and songwriters will have full control over whether and how their names, images, likenesses, voices and compositions are used in new AI-generated music,” Warner said in a statement.
In February this year, artist-led campaign group and advocacy coalition Artists For An Ethical and Sustainable Internet launched the Say No To Suno campaign, publishing an open letter that described Suno as a “brazen ‘smash and grab’ platform”.
“Artists need to understand Suno’s game,” the letter reads. “They are not putting technology in the service of artists; they are putting artists in the service of their technology.
“Every time artists’ creations are used by the platform, those creations have just unwittingly been contributed to the creation of endless derivatives of artists’ own work, not to mention AI slop, with limited or no remuneration back to the human creators. Suno built its business on our backs, scraping the world’s cultural output without permission, then competing against the very works exploited.”
News of the Suno hack arrives alongside the announcement that iPhone users with the Suno app installed can now generate songs directly from the Messages app using text or voice prompts.
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