Music AI Upstarts Udio, Suno, Lawyer Up with Latham & Watkins as Major Label Legal Battles Gear Up

Photo Credit: Steve Johnson

Two music AI startups hire Latham & Watkins, the firm representing Open AI and Anthropic, as legal battles with the major labels start heating up.GenAI music startups Suno and Udio have hired elite law firm Latham & Watkins, the firm representing Open AI and Anthropic, to defend them against the lawsuits filed by the Big Three (Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group, and Universal Music Group) in late June.

The lawsuits, filed by Sony, WMG, and UMG, claim that Udio and Suno have unlawfully copied the labels’ recordings to train their AI models to generate music, which could “saturate the market with machine-generated content that will directly compete with, cheapen, and ultimately drown out the genuine sound recordings on which [the labels were] built.”

The team at Latham representing the AI companies is led by Andrew Gass, Steve Feldman, Sy Damle, Britt Lovejoy, and Nate Taylor. The plaintiff labels are represented by Moez Kaba, Mariah Rivera, Alexander Perry, and Robert Klieger of Hueston Hennigan; and Daniel Cloherty of Cloherty & Steinberg.

Latham & Watkins have been key players in defending companies in the realm of artificial intelligence, including their work to defend Anthropic against infringement allegations filed by UMG and Concord Music last year. The firm also represents Open AI in the multitude of lawsuits filed against it, including the case filed by comedian Sarah Silverman alongside other writers, and the case levied against it by the New York Times.The fair use defense is a common one for AI companies in copyright cases, as it allows limited use of copyrighted material without permission under certain parameters. This will undoubtedly be a key component of Latham & Watkins’ defense of Suno and Udio’s activities. Fair use historically applies to things like parody and news reporting, but AI firms argue it applies equally to their “intermediate” use of millions of others’ works to create a platform that generates new creations.

It remains to be seen how well those arguments will fly once the legal proceedings begin. The music industry has long been critical of the datasets used by these and other AI companies and whether or not they contain unlicensed copyrights. To that point, a series of articles written by Ed Newton-Rex of AI music safety nonprofit Fairly Trained details how he was able to generate music from both Udio and Suno that bear “a striking resemblance” to copyrighted music, such as Jason Derulo, Jackson 5, Mariah Carey, Jerry Lee Lewis, The Temptations, and Lin Manuel Miranda.