Suno Hack Reveals AI Music Generator Scraped YouTube, Deezer and Genius

A hack has revealed that the AI music generator Suno was trained on decades of music and podcasts collected from the open internet, including YouTube, the streaming service Deezer and the lyrics site Genius. The report comes from 404 Media, which examined the leaked source code of the service.

What the hack revealed

The leaked Suno source code points directly to the sources of its training data: it contains calls to YouTube, Deezer and Genius. This is the first technical confirmation of where exactly the service got the music and podcasts used to train its models. Until now, the company had kept its list of sources secret.

Suno is an AI music generator that creates finished tracks with vocals and instrumentals from a text description. According to 404 Media, the scraping covered "decades" of audio recordings from the open internet.

• Data sources: YouTube (video and audio), Deezer (streaming) and Genius (song lyrics)
• The data included not only music but also podcasts
• The disclosure came through a source code leak, not an official company statement
• The outlet that published the findings is 404 Media

"The hacked source code shows how

Suno scraped decades of music and podcasts from the internet to train its AI tool," the 404 Media investigation says.

Why it matters in court

The finding hits Suno at a moment when it is already in litigation with the music industry. In June 2024, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), on behalf of Universal Music, Sony Music and Warner Records, filed a lawsuit against Suno, accusing the startup of mass copyright infringement in training.

Suno has already effectively acknowledged the scale of its data collection. In its court response, the company said its training set "includes essentially all music files of reasonable quality that are accessible on the open internet," and argued that such training falls under the fair use doctrine. The leaked code gives the plaintiffs the names of specific platforms, which strengthens their position.

What this means

The dispute over what generative models can legally be trained on is shifting from statements to technical evidence. The Suno source code leak shows that the question of training data sources for AI companies is no longer a black box, and this applies not only to music but to the entire generative AI industry.

Frequently asked questions

What is Suno?

Suno is an AI-based music generation service: from a text prompt, it creates finished songs with vocals and instrumentals. The data used to train its models is what ended up at the center of the scandal after the source code leak.

What is the lawsuit against Suno about?

In June 2024, the RIAA, on behalf of Universal, Sony and Warner, accused Suno of training its models on copyrighted music without the rights holders' permission. Suno maintains that training on publicly available data is fair use.