Suno calls lawsuit meritless, says platform blocks artist name prompts

The complaint, which is seeking class-action status, opens a new front in the legal fight over AI music tools. Rather than targeting the underlying recordings, the lawsuit focuses on artists’ rights of publicity — the legal claim that a person’s name, image, and likeness cannot be commercially exploited without consent.

“Jason Isbell’s musical identity does not cease to be his property merely because sophisticated technology is involved,” the lawsuit says.

Suno, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said in a statement that the claims are without merit. “Suno exists to help people create new, original music, not to trade on anyone’s name,” a company spokesperson said. The company said it stands behind its platform protections and uses third-party technology to screen uploaded audio and lyrics for unauthorized use of artists’ work.

In an August blog post on the company’s website, Suno Chief Executive Mikey Shulman wrote that “AI should help people create something new, not imitate someone else’s work,” adding that this principle had guided how the company’s models and platform were built. Suno has also said publicly that its platform blocks artists’ names from being used as prompts and that artists’ names were not used in training metadata.

Plaintiffs allege Suno’s safeguards are easy to evade

Isbell, a Grammy-winning singer-songwriter from Alabama, is joined by Camper Van Beethoven lead singer David Lowery, blues musician Guy Forsyth and saxophonist Eduardo Calle.

The complaint includes what it says are screenshots showing that entering the words “jason isbell” into Suno prompted the software to create a song called “Paper Bell.” According to the suit, Suno described the song as “contemporary Americana singer-songwriter with fingerpicked acoustic guitar” and “verse leans intimate and narrative.” The lawsuit says the song imitates “Isbell’s characteristic clear male vocals and country twang.”

The plaintiffs further allege that Suno’s safeguards against generating songs by typing in artists’ names are easy to circumvent — for example, by spelling an artist’s name with spaces between each letter. According to the complaint, Suno’s platform uses “a distillation of the identifying attributes of the human beings who made the songs and recordings: the qualities that make a listener say ‘that is Jason Isbell.’”

The plaintiffs are asking the court to order Suno to stop using their identities and are seeking unspecified damages.

The suit lands amid an unsettled landscape in which record labels, music publishers and AI startups are tangled in competing lawsuits and licensing deals. Last year, Warner Music settled claims against Suno and agreed to develop AI-powered products based on licensed songs, with the companies saying artists and songwriters would have the option to opt in. The licensed product has not yet launched, and the companies have said users will have to be paid subscribers to download songs.

Universal Music Group and Warner also struck deals with AI music platform Udio for licensed music, with both companies saying artists would be given the chance to participate and that songs created on Udio would stay within the platform. Sony Music Group has pending lawsuits against both Suno and Udio, while Universal’s lawsuit against Suno is also pending. Spotify is separately developing an AI-powered remixing tool based on licensed music that would allow users to create songs that stay within the platform.

Suno, which was recently valued at $5.4 billion in its latest fundraise, has positioned itself as a tool that lets users enter text prompts — such as genres, instruments and moods — to generate new songs. The plaintiffs’ complaint challenges that framing, alleging that the platform’s outputs are derivative of specific artists’ identities even when the underlying recordings are not directly reproduced.