Suno admits in court it used YT-DLP to pull YouTube audio for training

Suno’s answer to Universal, Capitol, and Sony admits “audio data was obtained from YouTube for use as training data using YT-DLP,” while challenging standing and pleading fair use — a pleading, not a judgment.

Suno wrote in its own court filing that it pulled YouTube audio for training with YT-DLP. Whether that breaks the law, and whether any of the labels’ songs were in that scrape, still belongs to the court.

Suno, Inc. filed a 26-page answer to the first amended complaint from UMG Recordings, Capitol Records, and Sony Music Entertainment in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts (docketed after the 25 August first amended complaint). Music Business Worldwide reviewed the pleading; The Verge recapped it on 11 September. That answer is the filing event.

Responding to paragraph 49, Suno writes: “Suno admits that audio data was obtained from YouTube for use as training data using YT-DLP.” YT-DLP is an open-source tool for downloading YouTube audio and video. The labels had alleged both YT-DL and YT-DLP were used to “circumvent YouTube’s encryption and scrape copyrighted recordings.” Suno’s answer names only YT-DLP. Music Business Worldwide: the YouTube point is repeated at five further places, including paragraphs 51 and 103.

Suno denies the remaining allegations and treats circumvention conclusions as legal conclusions. It argues the labels lack Article III standing to bring the DMCA anti-circumvention / stream-ripping claim — that they are not “person[s] injured” under 17 U.S.C. § 1203(a). Standing means the right to sue. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is the U.S. law that, among other things, bans bypassing technical locks. First affirmative defense: any copying of copyrightable expression is fair use under 17 U.S.C. § 107, “a back-end technological process, invisible to the public, in the service of creating an ultimately non-infringing new product.” Fair use is a legal defense that some copying is allowed. Those are Suno’s defenses, not findings.

Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV had already allowed the stream-ripping claim on 18 August 2026. Suno told the labels in May 2025 that it had downloaded YouTube audio with open-source tools including YT-DL and YT-DLP, according to that order. The later answer restates the YouTube download as a formal admission in Suno’s own pleading.

Suno admits its model was built on “tens of millions of instances of different kinds of recordings gathered from publicly available sources.” It “admits that Plaintiffs do not appear to be alleging that the outputs” of the model infringe the recordings in suit, and it denies that output similarities “betray that the models were trained on the Copyrighted Recordings.” Warner Music Group settled in November 2025. Fact discovery in the remaining case closes 30 September 2026. None of that is a ruling that the labels’ 560 recordings were in the YouTube set, or that stream-ripping liability attaches.