AI music generators like Suno and Udio can produce a passable track in seconds. Type a prompt, wait a moment, and you have something that sounds like music. It’s fast. It’s cheap. And for content creators looking for background music, it seems like the obvious shortcut.

But here’s the problem. The legal ground underneath AI-generated music is crumbling. And if you’re using it in commercial content, you might be standing on it when it gives way.

What AI-Generated Music Actually Is

AI music generators work by training machine learning models on massive datasets of existing music. The AI analyses patterns in melody, harmony, rhythm, instrumentation, and production across millions of tracks. When you type a prompt, the model generates new audio based on those learned patterns.

The critical detail: the training data is almost always copyrighted music, used without the permission of the artists who created it. The AI doesn’t compose from nothing. It learns from existing human work, then produces output that reflects what it absorbed.

This is where the legal trouble starts.

The Copyright Problem: Nobody Owns What the AI Creates

In January 2025, the U.S. Copyright Office published Part 2 of its report on AI and copyright. The conclusion was clear: purely AI-generated content cannot be copyrighted. The Office stated that copyright protection applies only where a human author has determined the expressive elements of a work. Simply typing a text prompt into an AI generator doesn’t meet that threshold. If you’re interested, you can read the full U.S. Copyright Office AI report here.

Then in March 2025, a federal appeals court reinforced this position, ruling that AI-generated works without meaningful human involvement do not qualify for copyright protection in the United States.

What this means for you: if you use AI-generated music in your video, podcast, or game, that music likely has no copyright protection. Anyone can copy it, reuse it, or claim it. Your competitor could use the exact same track, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

That’s not a hypothetical risk. It’s the current legal reality.

The Lawsuits: The Music Industry Is Fighting Back

In June 2024, Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Music Group filed coordinated lawsuits through the RIAA against both Suno and Udio, the two biggest AI music generators. The accusation: mass copyright infringement on what the RIAA described as an “almost unimaginable scale.” (source).

Both companies admitted they trained their models on copyrighted recordings. Their defence? Fair use. But that argument is far from settled, and the potential damages are severe: up to $150,000 per infringed track under U.S. copyright law.

By October 2025, UMG and Udio reached a settlement. The deal requires Udio to rebuild its platform using only authorised, licensed music for training. Importantly, songs created with Udio’s existing (unlicensed) model are now confined to a “walled garden” and cannot be exported or used commercially (more on the UMG-Udio settlement on Billboard here).

Sony and Warner’s cases against Udio continue. All three majors remain in active litigation with Suno. And in January 2026, UMG, Concord, and ABKCO filed what may be the single largest non-class action copyright case in U.S. history, seeking over $3 billion in damages from an AI company for alleged infringement of more than 20,000 songs.

The pattern is unmistakable: the music industry is treating unlicensed AI training as copyright infringement and pursuing it aggressively.

The Artists Are Speaking Up Too

In April 2024, over 200 prominent artists signed an open letter through the Artist Rights Alliance calling on AI developers to stop using their work without permission. The signatories included Billie Eilish, Stevie Wonder, Nicki Minaj, Katy Perry, Pearl Jam, Jon Bon Jovi, and the estates of Bob Marley and Frank Sinatra.

The letter described irresponsible AI training as “an assault on human creativity” and warned against a “deluge of AI-generated noise” aimed at replacing human artists.

When artists of that calibre agree on something, the direction of the industry is clear.

Why This Is Like Using Unlicensed Samples

If you’re a content creator, here’s a useful way to think about AI-generated music.

In traditional music production, sampling means taking a piece of an existing recording and using it in a new track. If you sample without clearing the rights, you’re infringing copyright. It doesn’t matter how short the sample is or how much you change it. Without a licence, it’s infringement. Artists and producers have been sued for millions over uncleared samples.

AI-generated music works on a similar principle, just at a much larger scale. Instead of sampling one track, the AI effectively “samples” millions of tracks to learn how music works. The output may not contain a direct copy of any single recording, but it’s built on the foundation of copyrighted work used without permission.

Suno itself has argued in court that its outputs don’t contain “samples” in the traditional sense. But the RIAA and the major labels disagree, pointing to tests where targeted prompts produced output that closely resembled specific copyrighted recordings.

Whether you call it sampling or training, the core issue is the same: using someone else’s copyrighted work without permission to create something you intend to profit from. The legal system is catching up to this reality fast as AI-detection software develops like Sony’s latest endeavour.

The Practical Risks for Content Creators

Even if you never get directly sued, using AI-generated music in commercial content carries real risks.

No copyright protection for your content’s audio. If the music can’t be copyrighted, you have no legal recourse if someone else uses it.

Platform liability. As AI copyright disputes play out, platforms like YouTube may start flagging or restricting AI-generated audio, just as they currently flag unlicensed traditional music through Content ID.

Uncertain provenance. If the AI music platform you used changes its terms, shuts down, or gets hit with an injunction, you may not be able to prove the legal status of the music in your published content.

Brand and reputation risk. As awareness of AI music ethics grows, using AI-generated music in professional or brand content could reflect poorly on your business.

Why Human-Composed Music Is the Safer Choice

When a human composer writes and records a piece of music, the copyright chain is clear. The composer created the work. They own it. They can issue a licence with specific terms. If there’s ever a question, there’s a paper trail.

Human-composed production music has none of the legal ambiguity of AI-generated audio. The rights are established. The licensing is straightforward. And the music is protected by copyright, which means your content is protected too.

Beyond the legal argument, there’s a quality argument. Human composers make intentional creative decisions that AI can’t reliably replicate: the subtle dynamics, the emotional phrasing, the compositional choices that make a piece of music feel like it was made with purpose rather than probability. AI can approximate the surface of music. It struggles with the depth.

Our music Is 100% Human-Composed

Every track in our catalogue is composed, performed, and produced by a real human musician. No generative AI is used in the creation of any track.

That means every piece of music comes with clear copyright ownership, transparent licensing terms, and none of the legal uncertainty that follows AI-generated audio. When you licence a track from our catalogue, you know exactly who made it, what your rights are, and that the music will stand up to any scrutiny. That goes for any custom music you hire us to make too.

In a landscape where AI music licensing is getting more complicated by the month, that clarity should provide you with peace of mind.

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