Suno has announced it will watermark tracks generated on its platform, restrict mass downloads, and tighten community rules to stop copycat songs. The updates arrive as the company faces multiple lawsuits from record labels and artist organisations.
The announcement
Co-founder and CEO Mikey Shulman outlined the changes in a blog post. He stated the platform aims to support original creation while allowing more people to make music using its AI tools.
Shulman noted that a major point of contention involved users uploading AI-generated songs to other streaming services or gaming the system for revenue. Suno said it will now use audio watermarking and fingerprinting to prevent misuse on external platforms. It is unclear whether the company will adopt an existing system like Google’s Synth ID or build a new one. Suno did not answer questions about this when contacted by TechCrunch.
The startup also signed an agreement with lyrics provider Musixmatch to use its Sentinal system for copyright detection.
“These tools are designed to be durable and resistant to tampering, without affecting the listening experience. They are also not intended to pass judgment on whether a song is good, meaningful, or sufficiently human,” Shulman wrote. “Ultimately, we believe it should be up to artists and platforms to decide what they want to disclose. Our role is to build tools that give them transparency options and make it easier to collaborate across the industry.”
Suno plans to introduce a new download policy that bars mass distribution on streaming services, though the company declined to provide specifics.
Community guidelines have been updated to explicitly ban “deceptive audio presented as real” and “using a real person’s voice or likeness without permission”.
Legal pressure
The company raised $400 million in a Series D funding round in June. It is currently fighting legal battles on several fronts. The startup is in a lawsuit with the Universal Music Group (UMG) and Sony Music Group, a case co-ordinated by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).
A German court ruled in favour of a government-mandated licensing agency, GEMA, late last month. The court said Suno was breaking copyright rules.
Separately, 404 Media reported that Suno experienced a data breach in November 2025. The incident revealed that the platform scraped YouTube, Deezer, and Genius to train its models. Later, data breach notification service Have I Been Pwned said the breach affected 55 million users. The startup now faces a class action lawsuit in Massachusetts, which alleges that the company overlooked security measures to focus on profit.
What it means
Users creating music on Suno will see watermarks on their files, making it harder to pass them off as human work on other services. The new rules mean creators can no longer upload AI tracks pretending they are real recordings or mimic specific singers without consent. Mass downloading for large-scale distribution is now blocked, limiting how easily these tracks can be pushed to streaming sites. For listeners, the audio experience should remain unchanged, but the metadata will now flag machine-generated content.
