Exclusive: AI music generator Suno opens SF office
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Suno marks yet another sign of investment in the SF market. Photo: Courtesy of Suno
An AI startup that lets users make music from prompts has opened an office in downtown San Francisco, Axios has learned.
The big picture: Suno's expansion is another sign of the AI boom fueling downtown's comeback, and brings to the city a company at the center of recent fights over using copyrighted music to train AI models.
Driving the news: Suno's new office, opened last week, is located in the South of Market, near Mission and 2nd.
- Opening doors in San Francisco "will be critical as we continue to scale," co-founder and CTO Georg Kucsko told Axios via email.
- The Cambridge-headquartered company launched in 2023 and is "investing especially heavily in our machine learning team to develop our frontier music model," according to Kucsko.
- The startup is planning to grow headcount by 70% across engineering, product design, data science and machine learning teams, and expects to double its workforce this year.
Between the lines: The company has been embroiled in legal challenges over its product.
- The Recording Industry Association of America sued Suno in 2024 on behalf of three major record labels, including Warner Music Group (WMG). The lawsuit accused Suno of "wholesale theft" by allegedly using copyrighted recordings to train its model without permission.
- Suno maintains that its platform is focused on creating new music and constitutes "fair use" under U.S. copyright law.
- WMG settled with Suno in November. The deal includes requiring Suno to create new models trained on licensed content and allowing WMG artists to opt in or out of the program.
Suno says it's meant to help users make new music and denies requests that reference specific artists or non-AI-generated music.
- Users are encouraged to report copyright infringement if they come across a song that belongs to another artist or incorporates elements of someone else's music.
What's next: Suno plans to launch the models developed with WMG and other industry partners this year.
- More than two-thirds of its team members are musicians, and they regularly host writing camps with producers and artists, per a Suno spokesperson.