Suno is facing yet another copyright infringement lawsuit, this time alleging its popular AI music model was trained on regional Mexican hits in order to generate Spanish-language songs.
The legal complaint was filed Monday (Aug. 31) by Gerencia 360 Music, an independent regional Mexican record label and publisher. It’s the latest in a string of AI training lawsuits brought against Suno by music rightsholders, including the majors, indies and individual artists.
Like other rightsholders, Gerencia alleges that Suno ripped its music from streaming services and then fed it into the training corpus for an AI model that now allows users to generate new songs with the click of a button. Monday’s lawsuit, however, specifically says Gerencia’s catalog was necessary for Suno to teach its model to create songs in Spanish.
“Gerencia’s works are especially important to Suno because they are hugely popular Spanish language works, which Suno has misappropriated to train its models so they may provide Spanish language songs in response to user queries,” reads the complaint, filed by veteran music litigator Richard Busch. “Without its infringement of Gerencia’s Spanish language copyrighted works, Suno would not have been well-positioned to capture a significant share of the Spanish language AI user market.”
Busch says Gerencia’s catalog includes “some of the most recognizable and commercially valuable songs in the history of Regional Mexican and Latin music,” including works by Adriel Favela, Javier Rosas, Giovanny Ayala, Cornelio Vega y su Dinastia and Noel Torres. The lawsuit is seeking nearly $100 million in damages.
A Suno rep declined to comment on the lawsuit Monday.
Suno’s copyright troubles began in 2024, when the three major labels banded together to sue the AI company for infringing their sound recordings “at an almost unimaginable scale.” Other rightsholders have since jumped in with their own copyright infringement suits against Suno, including a group of indie artists pursuing class action status and production music company Jamendo. Two weeks ago, indie publisher Round Hill Music opened up another case (also authored by Busch).
Suno maintains that its AI training process was legal under copyright law’s fair use principle, which allows unlicensed works to be reused for transformative purposes. It remains to be seen whether a judge will agree; fair use is an untested legal question at the center of dozens of ongoing AI copyright lawsuits right now.
Meanwhile, Suno has made peace with some big players in the music industry. Warner Music Group (WMG) exited the majors’ lawsuit last fall by inking a landmark settlement that requires to Suno to train a new model on licensed music, and BMG reached a similar deal with Suno earlier this month.
