Leaks Reveal Suno Fed 1000’s of Hours of Deezer, YouTube and Pond5 Knowledge Into Its AI – Decrypt

A hacker broke into AI music platform Suno and walked out with supply code that paperwork, in exact element, precisely the place the corporate’s coaching information got here from.

The breach was first reported by 404 Media, which reviewed the leaked information. It confirms what the music business had been saying in courts since 2024.

The intruder claims to have used a chunk of malware referred to as the Shai-Hulud worm—named after the large sandworms in Frank Herbert’s Dune. Suno, one of many largest AI music mills on-line, lets customers kind a textual content description and obtain a full tune in seconds; constructing that functionality required a considerable coaching dataset—a group of audio information used to show the mannequin what completely different genres and kinds sound like.

The leaked materials consists of scraping directions and inner logs from 2023 and 2024, providing a uncommon take a look at how these pipelines are literally assembled.

The dataset breakdown is particular. In response to inner file feedback reviewed by 404 Media, the coaching library included 113,879 hours of YouTube Music, 152,162 hours of tagged YouTube tracks, 62,117 hours from inventory music library Pond5, 12,287 hours from Deezer, and 17,615 hours in a dataset labeled genius_hq, related to materials collected by Genius. The code additionally documented plans to obtain roughly 1 million hours of podcast audio through RSS feeds.

One inner file monitoring YouTube Music ingestion alone logged 2,013,545 music clips. That is hundreds of thousands of recordings protecting many years of audio—and the urge for food wasn’t restricted to music.

The hacker claimed to have accessed data related to lots of of hundreds of shoppers, together with emails, cellphone numbers, and Stripe-related info. Suno disputes that delicate private info was compromised.

The corporate says it recognized the incident in November 2025 and referred to as it “restricted.” Suno decided the publicity primarily concerned outdated supply code now not in use and concluded that particular person buyer notifications weren’t required underneath relevant privateness legal guidelines. Customers are solely discovering that out now, by information protection.

This is the factor: Suno had already instructed anybody keen to learn its personal web site that one thing like this was taking place. Underneath California’s AB 2013 regulation—which requires AI corporations to reveal their coaching practices—the corporate publicly acknowledged that its coaching information could embrace music “topic to mental property safety,” and listed the corpus at tens of hundreds of thousands of publicly accessible music audio information. What the hack provides is specificity: The authorized submitting was imprecise by design, and the leaked code shouldn’t be.

The scope of AI music coaching was already changing into clear earlier than anybody breached something. In June 2026, The Atlantic printed 4 searchable databases documenting music used to coach AI fashions—one containing 12 million tracks, one other with 9 million, and two extra with round 100,000 every. You can search for your favourite artist earlier than a hacker handed anybody supply code.

The Recording Trade Affiliation of America had alleged in a 2025 modification to its authentic 2024 lawsuit in opposition to Suno that the corporate was ripping songs instantly from YouTube—an accusation Suno contested underneath a good use protection. The go well with sought $150,000 per infringement incident. The hacked supply code corroborates the RIAA’s central allegation.

Udio, which was focused in a parallel lawsuit filed by the identical major-label coalition, settled with Warner Music in November 2025 and is now transitioning to a licensed platform. Suno’s case with Sony and UMG stays lively in federal courtroom; the corporate’s valuation sits at $5.4 billion with round 100 million customers on the platform.

Suno didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark by Decrypt.