Suno trained its AI on millions of songs scraped from YouTube — and a hack just proved it
A hacker accessed Suno's source code and revealed how the AI music app scraped over two million songs from YouTube Music, Deezer and Genius to train its models.
Suno, one of the world’s most popular AI music apps, has a friendly slogan: “make any song you can imagine”. What a data leak has now shown is where that imagination comes from — millions of other people’s songs, scraped from YouTube Music, Deezer, Genius and stock-music libraries, without a licence.
The story starts with a breach: a hacker used an employee’s credentials, compromised in a supply-chain attack back in November, to get into the company’s source code. Inside sat the treasure map — Suno’s scraping systems and the logs of what they had collected: more than two million tracks from YouTube Music, thousands of hours of audio from Deezer, tens of thousands of hours of stock music, plus lyrics harvested at scale from Genius.
What does the Suno leak actually show?
In short, what the record labels always suspected and the company never detailed. The RIAA, representing Universal, Sony and Warner, sued Suno in 2024 for copyright infringement “on an almost unimaginable scale” — and the company has always answered with the same defence: training on “publicly available” music from the open internet is fair use. The exposed code hands the labels’ lawyers something they didn’t have before: the technical detail of how the collection worked around the platforms’ protections.
The timing catches the industry in a curious spot: Warner had already left the war behind and signed a licensing deal with Suno in late 2025, while the other majors fight on in court. And the debate is the same one running through studios using generative AI across hundreds of titles: where does inspiration end and industrial-scale copying begin?
For working musicians, the leak has a bitter taste: proof that the machine that “imagines any song” started by listening to all of theirs — without asking anyone first.
By Lucy Bennett
Image: Suno
