Every published Top AI Stories item tagged with Suno AI, newest first.
Suno, best known for AI-generated songs, has opened a public beta of Speech, which writes a voiceover from a script or a short description and can generate matching background music in the same track. A toggle turns the music off for plain narration, and users can set the voice's gender, speaking style and variety. Clips run up to about eight minutes. Suno's product chief said "beta really does mean beta," warning that British accents sometimes drift toward Australian. The move into speech puts Suno against ElevenLabs while record labels continue to sue it over its music models.
Sony Music and Universal Music Group, the two major labels that have not licensed their catalogs to Suno, filed a new lawsuit on Thursday aimed at its v6 model. Suno says v6 was trained from the ground up on partner-licensed content and on creations and preference signals from its users. The labels argue that those user creations came from earlier Suno models trained on their recordings, and that v6 was also distilled from those older models. "Training a 'new' model on the outputs of an infringing model does not eliminate the infringement; it launders it," the complaint says. The case tests whether a clean retraining can wash out an earlier dataset, which matters to every lab that trains on its own models' outputs.
Suno shipped v6 in three variants and says it was built from the ground up on data that excludes what earlier models were trained on, licensed from Warner Music Group, BMG and Believe alongside user data. Older models will be retired, and an opt-in program is planned to let artists take a share of revenue when their work is remixed. That is a different posture from a watermark, which is what the company offered a month ago; it is also incomplete, because the suits from Sony and Universal are still running. The Verge's hands-on found genre control much improved and the advertised natural imperfections still missing, which is the honest limit of a model sold partly on sounding less machine-made.
Suno says it will add watermarking and fingerprinting so its output can be identified once it leaves the platform, plus a download policy meant to block mass uploads to streaming services, and it has licensed Musixmatch's Sentinel system to detect lyric copying. Asked whether the watermark would use Google's SynthID or something proprietary, the company declined to say — which matters, because an identifier only helps if the platforms receiving the music can read it. Suno is defending suits from Universal and Sony coordinated by the Recording Industry Association of America, and lost a copyright ruling to the German rights society GEMA in July.
Leaked Suno source code from a breach shows the AI music startup scraped enormous volumes of copyrighted audio to train its models — including roughly 114,000 hours from YouTube Music plus thousands more from Deezer and Genius — routed through commercial proxies to bypass anti-bot defenses. The trove also exposed contact and partial payment data for hundreds of thousands of customers, who say they were never notified. The details could strengthen the copyright suits Universal and Sony have already brought against the company.
Suno raised a $400 million Series D led by Bond, more than doubling its valuation to $5.4 billion just seven months after its last round — a sign investors still see runaway demand for generative music. The raise lands while Universal Music Group, Sony, and Germany's rights society GEMA press copyright suits accusing Suno of training on tens of thousands of songs without permission; Warner settled and signed a license last year. Suno maintains its training is fair use.