AI models tend to be black boxes, but it seems they do become a little less opaque if you forcibly crack them open. According to a report from 404 Media, a hacker who allegedly breached AI music generation platform Suno back in November 2025 was able to get a peek into the trove of training data that was used to build Suno’s models—and it contains lots of works from artists that the company seems to have scraped from streaming platforms. Per 404 Media, the hacker was able to get their hands on source code from Suno between 2023 and 2024, which seems to include scraping instructions and a sense of just how much material Suno’s model was sucking up. The code seems to suggest that Suno scraped material from the lyrics platform Genius, YouTube Music, streaming platform Deezer, and various stock music libraries like Freesound and the International Music Score Library Project. A file related to YouTube Music suggested that at the time, the company had scraped 2,013,545 music clips from the platform. Another dataset quantified it by time rather than files: 113,879 hours of music from YouTube Music, 17,615 from Genius, 62,117 hours from royalty-free music site Pond5—and the list goes on.
A spokesperson for Suno confirmed the hack to Gizmodo. “In November of 2025, we determined that Suno had been the subject of a limited security incident that was quickly contained,” the spokesperson said. “At the time, we immediately conducted an investigation and verified that the incident primarily involved outdated source code that is no longer in use at Suno.”
