Musician Jason Isbell is leading a group of artists suing AI music generator Suno, alleging the company has misappropriated and exploited their identities.
The group, which also includes Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven frontman David Lowery, Texas blues singer-songwriter Guy Forsyth, and saxophonist Eduardo Calle, has filed suit in U.S. District Court in Massachusetts. The artists say Suno lets users generate music that sounds like an artist’s work, effectively stealing individual styles.
It’s an unusual suit in that it focuses on identity rather than copyright. And it approaches that argument in an unusual fashion, opening not with the legalese or direct accusations typically found in a court filing, but with an essay on the Borg, one of the major villains in Star Trek: The Next Generation.
“The Borg are one of science fiction’s most terrifying villains, representing the ultimate violation of individual identity and autonomy,” it reads. “Autonomy is consumed and repurposed in the service of a cold machine intelligence that feels nothing for what it has taken.”
The case against the “Borg Collective”
The filing eventually gets to the heart of its argument, alleging that Suno lets users copy an artist’s style without permission and without compensating those artists. And yes, it ties those two topics together.
“Suno possesses something uncomfortably like the Borg Collective itself: a vast database of tokens, each capturing the identifying attributes of musicians, organized into formulas whose very existence is defined by the identities Suno ingested” it reads. “Jason Isbell’s musical identity does not cease to be his property merely because sophisticated technology is involved.”
The plaintiffs are seeking class-action status for their complaint, as well as unspecified damages.
Isbell, through his manager, declined to comment further on the suit. Suno, in a statement to Fast Company, denied any wrongdoing.
“We believe these claims are without merit and we intend to defend against them,” a spokesperson said. “Suno exists to help people create new, original music, not to trade on anyone’s name. We stand by the many protections we have put into place across the platform, including blocking prompts for specific artists’ names or copyrighted songs.”
Suno says it has safeguards that prevent users from generating songs by entering artists’ names. The lawsuit, however, alleges those safeguards are easy to circumvent.
“It encoded musicians” identities into its AI model to create its commercial product without consent, and now exploits those identities by publicly using musicians’ names to Suno’s considerable commercial benefit,” the filing reads.
This isn’t a copyright case
The issue at stake here is different from those in other artist-related lawsuits against AI companies. At the center of the argument are not artists’ recordings, but the identities of the artists themselves. The lawsuit, the filing says, “seeks to recover the value of those misappropriated identities and to stop their ongoing commercial exploitation.”
Last month, Suno CEO Mikey Shulman posted a blog entry on the company’s website about its technology, saying “we intentionally chose not to use artist names in our training metadata because our goal is to help people create original songs – not music that sounds like existing artists.”
The lawsuit, though, alleges Suno captured and stored artist voiceprints, allowing users to bypass its guardrails.
That differs from the lawsuits Suno faced a year ago, when the Recording Industry Association of America sued it for copyright infringement. Warner Music settled its dispute with Suno last November, but Universal Music Group and Sony Music are still pursuing the case.
“What the major record labels really don’t want is competition,” Suno wrote in its response to that suit from the labels. “Where Suno sees musicians, teachers, and everyday people using a new tool to create original music, the labels see a threat to their market share.”
Suno is hardly the only AI company facing legal action from artists. Sony Music and Warner Chappell sued Anthropic earlier this year for allegedly training Claude on copyrighted songs. That followed a similar suit from Universal in March.
AI startup Lovo, meanwhile, is facing a trademark violation lawsuit from voice actors who allege the company used their talents without permission.
