AI-music firm Suno’s big announcement yesterday was a new integration with Apple’s iMessage app, but it was rather undercut by an investigative report claiming to answer the longstanding question of what it trained its model on.
The iMessage feature is an app extension for Apple’s core messaging app, enabling people to create songs and send them to friends – including using their own vocals and/or lyrics.
It’s a logical extension of Suno’s iOS app, but within the music industry attention today is focusing on the article on 404 Media, which it said was based on “a hacker who breached the company and shared data about Suno’s training libraries”.
This is source code from 2023 and 2024 that includes comments alluding to Genius, YouTube Music, Deezer, Freesound and Jamendo.
Suno has responded to the hack with a statement.
“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,” said its spokesperson.
The company described the data breach as “a limited security incident that was quickly contained” that involved “outdated source code that is no longer in use at Suno and that no sensitive personal information was compromised”.
We will now see how the sources respond. Jamendo is already suing Suno alleging that it trained its model on the company’s catalogue without authorisation.
What Deezer, YouTube and Genius make of the 404 Media report – not to mention UMG and Sony Music, who are still locked in litigation with Suno – remains to be seen. But we sense we may not have to wait long to find out.
