Suno asks judge to dismiss Jason Isbell’s lawsuit over AI use of artist identities

Suno asked a federal judge on November 3, 2026, to dismiss Jason Isbell’s proposed class-action lawsuit over musicians’ identities. The AI music company argues that using an artist’s name to describe a sound is protected speech, challenging the lawsuit’s premise that its service commercially exploits performers’ personas without their consent.

The motion, filed in Massachusetts federal court, is Suno’s first major response to the case. Its defense has two parts: artists’ names can lawfully communicate musical ideas, and federal copyright law bars the state-law claims the musicians are pursuing.

Isbell and other musicians sued in August, alleging that Suno encoded their identities into its model and lets users summon music evoking them. The proposed class action seeks to represent potentially millions of artists. Unlike litigation over copyrighted recordings used for AI training, this case centers on rights protecting a person’s name, image and likeness from commercial exploitation.

The competing accounts begin with what happens when someone enters a performer’s name. Suno says it does not allow specific artist names as prompts to its music model. Instead, the platform converts those requests into descriptive musical characteristics that can guide a generated song.

A request naming Duran Duran, for example, might become a direction for new wave, synth-pop and pop rock. In Suno’s account, the name supplies information about a musical category rather than remaining an artist-specific instruction to the model.

The musicians dispute both the safeguards and their significance. Their complaint alleges that users can evade artist-name restrictions by spacing out letters, including in Taylor Swift’s and Bad Bunny’s names. It also argues that translating a name into style descriptions does not resolve the underlying objection: Suno allegedly built a commercial model that indexes musicians by name and encodes their identities without permission.

The company extends that argument to the tool itself: recognizing a name and acting on the information it conveys should not be unlawful, its lawyers say. The motion characterizes the lawsuit as an attack on common ways of communicating ideas and argues that allowing it to proceed would harm the creative and cultural ecosystem.

The lawsuit invokes state protections in New York, California, Tennessee and elsewhere. Suno argues that even if those likeness rights could cover the alleged conduct, federal copyright law would override the claims. That argument relies on preemption, a doctrine barring state claims that conflict with federal law.

Suno’s position is that Congress deliberately left artistic styles outside copyright protection so later creators could build on earlier work within a genre. Letting musicians use state likeness laws to control those styles, it argues, would create a parallel intellectual-property system that conflicts with that federal choice.

The plaintiffs’ theory instead puts the commercial use of an identifiable musician at the center, not ownership of a genre. Suno’s motion asks the judge to reject that legal distinction and dismiss the case. An attorney for Isbell did not immediately respond to Billboard’s request for comment on November 3.