Four musicians, including acclaimed independent singer-songwriter Jason Isbell, sued the music AI company Suno on Aug 31, accusing it of imitating their voices and distinctive styles without permission.

The musicians who brought the case – who also include Guy Forsyth, Eduardo Calle and David Lowery, an outspoken advocate for artists’ rights in the digital age – were seeking class-action status from the court.

Suno, which was founded in 2022, is one of a number of platforms that allow online users, whether professional musicians or total amateurs, to create songs by entering a few descriptive words or phrases into a text box. Within minutes, or even seconds, Suno generates a tune based on the user’s prompt.

In a crowded field of AI music, Suno has become a leader, with investors valuing the company at US$5.4 billion (S$6.88 billion), far more than any independent competitor.

But like other AI music companies, Suno has faced a series of lawsuits from the music industry over how its machine-learning model was trained.

Record companies and music publishers have said the company has violated copyright on a massive scale by using millions of songs without their permission. In court papers, Suno has defended its model by saying that the training is allowed under fair use, a legal principle that offers a defense against copyright infringement claims in limited circumstances.

The latest suit, filed in US District Court in Massachusetts, opens up a new legal front against Suno, focusing not on copyright but on what the plaintiffs say is an unlawful imitation of the personal styles and voices of specific artists.

According to the musicians’ complaint, Suno “encoded musicians’ identities into its AI model to create its commercial product without consent, and now exploits those identities by publicly using musicians’ names to Suno’s considerable commercial benefit”.

They cited state privacy and right-of-publicity laws in more than a dozen states, including Massachusetts, New York, Tennessee, California...