Musicians’ Union Pushes Back Against Universal and Warner in Landmark AI Lawsuit

The American Federation of Musicians is not letting the majors off the hook. In a filing submitted Friday, September 4, to a New York federal court, the union formally opposed motions to dismiss brought by Universal Music Group, Warner Records, and Atlantic Recording Corp. At the center of the dispute are the sweeping licensing deals the majors have struck with generative artificial intelligence companies. As reported by Music Business Worldwide, the AFM alleges that its members’ recordings were fed into AI engines for commercial exploitation without proper authorization or collective bargaining protections. The majors spent decades preaching copyright sanctity whenever peer-to-peer sharing threatened their bottom line. Watching those same boardrooms rush to monetize their master vaults with tech firms while sidestepping the actual studio musicians who laid the tracks down is rank hypocrisy. If the labels succeed here, session players become nothing more than unpaid raw data for an algorithmic pipeline. The New York court will now rule on whether the AFM’s claims move forward into discovery or get tossed before the labels have to answer for their licensing terms.