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A hacker attack revealed how the app Suno AI, which is used to make AI generated songs, scraped millions of songs from across the web to feed into its AI model, according to 404 Media that got contacted by the hacker himself.
Suno is one of the largest AI music generation tools on the internet and this is not the first time it has been the subject of major lawsuits from the record industry. The record industry accused Suno of training on millions of copyrighted songs, to which Suno admitted that it was trained on “essentially all music files of reasonable quality that are accessible on the open internet,” which included a total of “tens of millions of recordings.”, and has been making the argument that it is allowed to train on copyrighted songs as fair use.
The lawsuits confirmed that Suno did train using copyrighted songs but the data shared with 404 Media showed how Suno scraped songs from the internet and where it took them from. The Recording Industry Association of America accused Suno of ripping songs directly from YouTube; the hacked data seen by 404 Media confirms this. The breach occurred in late 2025 but wasn’t revealed until now. In addition to potential payment and user information, leaked materials shared with writer Jason Koebler show Suno reportedly trained its model by scraping millions of songs and lyrics from YouTube, Deezer and Genius, in addition to stock music libraries like Jamendo, Freesound, Pond5, and the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP). Suno is just one of many AI tools that are subject to lawsuits and is currently being sued by Sony and Universal Music Group for copyright infringement, the litigation continues.
Suno stated to 404 that “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.” They have also stated that their main goal has always been to help people create original new music and not replicate someone else’s.
The “Say No To Suno” Campaign
“Say No To Suno” is an artist-led campaign calling on the music community to reject Suno AI which was launched via an open letter in February 2026. The open letter calls Suno “a brazen smash and grab” platform that trains its models on human music without proper consent or compensation. The letter was signed by figures including Ron Gubitz, Executive Director of the Music Artist Coalition; Helienne Lindvall, songwriter and President of the European Composer and Songwriter Alliance; and Chris Castle of the Artist Rights Institute. Other signatories included artist David C. Lowery; artist and Artist Rights Alliance board member Tift Merritt; Blake Morgan, artist, producer, and President of ECR Music Group; and Abby North, President of North Music Group.
So far, The Human Artistry Campaign has hired planes to fly anti-Suno banners over an AI summit in Santa Monica where the CEO of Suno, Mikey Shulman, was speaking.
