Suno adds audio watermarks to fight copyright lawsuits

Generative audio platform Suno is implementing watermarks across all its music outputs to help streaming services identify and manage AI-generated tracks. According to Suno CEO and co-founder Mikey Shulman, the company will embed an invisible, tamper-resistant code directly into the audio waveforms. While Shulman did not specify whether Suno is building its own tool or licensing an existing one, Google recently began licensing its SynthID technology, which has already flagged 100 billion images and videos alongside 60,000 years of audio produced by Gemini models.

This move comes as Suno faces intense legal pressure from the traditional music industry. The company is currently battling copyright infringement lawsuits from Sony and Universal in the United States, alongside a German court ruling that found Suno in violation of local music licensing laws. Additionally, a lawsuit in Massachusetts addresses a late 2025 hack in which Suno allegedly scraped training data from YouTube and Deezer while exposing the private information of millions of users. To mitigate these issues, Suno previously agreed to limit downloads in a settlement with Warner Music Group last year.

For music practitioners and platform developers, this shift signals a transition toward stricter content provenance in digital audio. Streaming platforms like Spotify will gain the technical capability to automatically label or block Suno-generated tracks, helping to curb the influx of low-quality AI uploads. Suno is also updating its usage policies to prevent large-scale abuse. The platform already bars users from referencing specific artists or songs in prompts and collaborates with Musixmatch to block copyrighted uploads, aiming to position its technology as a legitimate creative assistant rather than a tool for mass-producing unauthorized content.