Jason Isbell Sues Suno Over AI Exploitation
Jason Isbell, David Lowery, and two other musicians have filed a class action lawsuit against AI music company Suno, alleging it commercially exploited their identities and voiceprints without consent.
Grammy winner Jason Isbell and Cracker frontman David Lowery have sued AI music company Suno in a proposed class action. The lawsuit, filed in Boston federal court on August 31, also includes Texas blues musician Guy Forsyth and Florida saxophonist Eduardo Calle as plaintiffs. The 84-page complaint contains no copyright claims. It instead accuses Suno of building a commercial product that responds to a musician's name by generating a song, a written description, and a cover image evoking that person. The plaintiffs allege Suno captured and stored "voiceprints" - defined as the unique identifying characteristics of an individual's voice - without consent.
The complaint alleges Suno built a model to index musicians by name, encoding their identities into its AI. The company now exploits those identities by using musicians' names for its benefit. To demonstrate, the plaintiffs provided examples of outputs generated when artist names were entered into Suno's models, including songs for Jason Isbell and Camper Van Beethoven. The filing claims the Jason Isbell output imitated his "characteristic clear male vocals and country twang." The complaint lists around 20 further examples of known artists being entered.
Suno has publicly stated its platform blocks such uses, saying it intentionally does not use artist names as training metadata. The plaintiffs call this claim false, alleging Suno not only accepts names but also responds with an output based on that musician's identity. They also allege the filter can be circumvented by putting spaces between the letters of a name.
The complaint spreads its claims across 17 counts, with the total at stake across the proposed class topping $5 million. The plaintiffs ask the judge to award damages, order Suno to hand over profits, and add punitive damages where permitted. They also seek a court order barring Suno from capturing, storing, or commercially exploiting musicians' voices, names, and identifying attributes without consent. The filing states, "The claim is narrower and older than that: no one may commercially exploit another's right of publicity in their name and identity."
A second set of claims concerns voice data, brought under Illinois' Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA). The plaintiffs allege Suno's processing pipeline computed and stored measurements of individual singers' voices, amounting to "voiceprints" under the law. The complaint states Suno never obtained the written consent BIPA requires. Suno raised more than $400 million in June at a $5.4 billion valuation and projects $1 billion in revenue by 2028.
Suno faces other legal challenges. The company is defending copyright claims from Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, independent artists, and European collecting societies. A separate group of independent musicians brought similar biometric privacy and right-of-publicity claims against Suno in Illinois in October 2025.
