Breaking

Leaked Source Code Points to Suno Scraping Millions of Songs, Lyrics and Podcasts From YouTube, Deezer and More

July 15, 2026 at 13:09 EDT

Media Generation
Policy & Regulation
Security

A breach of AI music generator Suno has surfaced source code that indicates the company scraped decades' worth of music, lyrics and podcast audio from YouTube, Deezer, Genius and other platforms to train its models, adding fresh fuel to the copyright battles already surrounding the startup.

November 2025 · Breach Disclosure

A Hack of Suno Exposes the Scraped Audio Behind Its AI Music

Leaked source code points to decades of music, lyrics and podcast audio harvested from YouTube, Deezer, Genius and other platforms — fueling the copyright fights already surrounding the startup.

~2M

Music clips referenced from YouTube Music

~1M

Hours of speech targeted across ~420,000 podcasts

Decades

Of recorded audio spanned by the training pool

Hours of audio scraped, by source

As cited in the leaked code — column height proportional to hours

152,162

113,879

62,117

19,514

17,615

12,287

3,726

YT Music (tags)

YT Music

Pond5

IMSLP

Genius

Deezer

Jamendo

What the code suggested

Streams appeared to be ripped directly from YouTube, with requests routed through proxies to evade detection — a technique the RIAA has called illegal stream ripping.

Training-library references & source code (2023–2024)

Podcasts with ≥5 episodes running 30+ minutes targeted

Exposed emails, phone numbers & partial payment records

Suno's Position

Calls it a limited, quickly contained incident affecting mostly old, unused code
Says training used publicly available files and argues fair use under U.S. law
States systems are built for "original creation" with anti-impersonation safeguards

The Pushback

Major labels allege wholesale copying of millions of protected recordings
Independent artists say they found their own music and call it theft
Leaked inventory could sharpen infringement and stream-ripping claims

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