The major music companies have escalated their copyright infringement lawsuit against AI music generation company Suno, filing an amended complaint that alleges the startup illegally “stream ripped” copyrighted recordings from YouTube to train its AI models.
The amended complaint, filed on September 19, 2025, in the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts and obtained by InterSpace Daily, introduces damaging new allegations that Suno “acquired many (if not all) of the copyrighted sound recordings in its training data by illicitly downloading them from YouTube using a notorious method of music piracy known as ‘stream ripping.’”
The complaint suggests that Suno may have ‘stream-ripped’ millions of copyrighted sound recordings to train its model.
The timing of the new allegations appears directly connected to Anthropic’s recent USD $1.5 billion settlement with authors, who claimed the service obtained pirated books to train its AI models.
Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Music Group now claim that Suno circumvented YouTube’s technological protection measures – specifically its “rolling cipher” encryption – to illegally download and copy their copyrighted recordings for use in training its AI music generation models.
You can read their amended complaint in full through here.
The Anthropic settlement, confirmed earlier this month, has clearly emboldened the record labels to pursue more aggressive legal strategies against AI companies.
The labels now argue that Suno’s actions constitute a breach of the Copyright Act’s anti-circumvention provisions, which state that “no person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.”
The amended complaint maintains the original lawsuit’s core allegations, filed in June 2024, that Suno copied and ingested “decades worth of the world’s most popular sound recordings” without permission to train its AI models.
The labels are now seeking statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work infringed, as well as up to $2,500 for each act of circumvention of technological measures.
They are also requesting injunctive relief to prevent Suno from continuing to circumvent YouTube’s protections and infringe their copyrights.
Suno has previously attempted to justify its conduct by claiming ‘fair use’ protections under US copyright law.
The labels describe this tactic as “a tacit admission of Suno’s illegal copying, as fair use only comes into play when an unauthorized use of a copyrighted work needs to be justified.”
The complaint notes that Suno has raised USD $125 million in funding, valuing it at approximately $500 million, and claims over 12 million users have created music using its service.
“Suno further touts a roster of high-profile backers and has monetized its service, charging users up to $24 per month for its highest subscription tier,” reads the complaint. “None of that would be possible without the vast troves of copyrighted sound recordings that Suno copied to train its AI models.”
The amended filing includes a potentially damaging admission from Antonio Rodriguez, a partner at venture capital firm Matrix Partners and one of Suno’s earliest investors.
Rodriguez is quoted as saying his firm invested in Suno with full knowledge that the company might face lawsuits from copyright owners.
“Honestly, if we had deals with labels when this company got started, I probably wouldn’t have invested in it. I think they needed to make this product without the constraints,” Rodriguez told Rolling Stone in 2024.
By “constraints,” the labels argue, Rodriguez was referring to “the need to adhere to ordinary copyright rules and seek permission from rightsholders to copy and use their works.”
The complaint alleges Rodriguez was willing to “underwrite” the costs of potential lawsuits because he expected his investment in Suno to be profitable despite damages owed to copyright owners.
Suno’s alleged practice of stream ripping was made public on September 2, 2025, after the International Confederation of Music Publishers (ICMP) shared evidence with Billboard.
According to the RIAA complaint, this evidence consisted of “private datasets that demonstrate the illegal scraping of copyrighted sound recordings from YouTube by Suno.”
The labels explain that YouTube employs a “rolling cipher” encryption measure to control access to licensed content and prevent unauthorized downloading.
This encryption creates two different URLs for any given video – a page URL visible to users for the webpage where video playback occurs, and a file URL not visible to users for the video file itself.
“The file URL is encrypted using a complex and periodically changing algorithm – the ‘rolling cipher’ – that is designed to impede external access to the underlying YouTube video files, thereby preventing or inhibiting any downloading, copying, or distribution of the videos,” the complaint explains.
Despite these protections, the labels allege Suno employed code to circumvent these measures and illegally download their copyrighted recordings.
