What is the union actually claiming?
The American Federation of Musicians has gone after Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group over a simple charge: that the labels handed members’ instrumental recordings to the AI generators Suno and Udio to train on, without asking the players or paying them. The complaint, reported in early June, says the labels would not disclose which catalogues or whose recordings went into the machines, calls it a breach of the union’s collective bargaining agreement, and frames it bluntly, the work was "fed into AI machines for profit" while the labels "protected their own interests."
The sting is the timing. These are the same majors that sued Suno and Udio in 2024 calling the training theft.
Why does this land hardest on electronic music?
Because Suno and Udio spit out full electronic tracks from a line of text, and that lane is filling fast: Deezer has already said synthetic uploads are a large share of what it receives every day. The catalogues being mined are full of the session players, vocalists and instrumentalists whose stems make house and its cousins sound like humans made them. If a major can quietly license that into a model, the precedent reaches every producer who is signed to, distributed by, or sampled from a major.
How did we get here?
The path is short and cynical. In 2024 the majors and the RIAA sued the AI firms. Then they settled: Universal struck a deal with Udio in October 2025, Warner with Suno in November 2025, with the Suno deal even folding in Warner’s Songkick. Suno went on to raise 400 million dollars at a 5.4 billion valuation. Now the people who actually played on the records say they were written out of the deal. Sony is still litigating, with a key fair-use hearing in the Suno case looming.
The labels did exactly what they had warned about, says the union.
