Major record companies, including the Sony, Universal and Warner conglomerates, sued two digital music generation companies on Monday (US time), accusing them of using copyrighted sounds and songs to train the artificial intelligence that powers their businesses.

The two companies being sued, Udio and Suno, allow users to create songs almost instantly by submitting a text command, much like how AI services such as Midjourney produce images based on text prompts.

The power of AI is upending numerous industries, and companies able to take advantage of the technology can financially benefit. However, the music industry plaintiffs argued in their lawsuits that the songs produced by these AI companies were possible only because the systems were trained on reams of intellectual property that the plaintiffs own.

“The foundation of its business has been to exploit copyrighted sound recordings without permission,” said the lawsuits filed against Udio and Suno in a US federal court.

“Building and operating a service like Udio’s requires at the outset copying and ingesting massive amounts of data to ‘train’ a software ‘model’ to generate outputs,” one suit said. “For Udio specifically, this process involved copying decades worth of the world’s most popular sound recordings.”

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The suits are asking the courts to declare that the companies have engaged in copyright infringement and to assign damages.

“These are straightforward cases of copyright infringement involving unlicensed copying of sound recordings on a massive scale,” Ken Doroshow, the chief legal officer of the Recording Industry Association of America, a trade organisation, said in a statement.

Doroshow added: “These lawsuits are necessary to reinforce the most basic rules of the road for the responsible, ethical and lawful development of generative AI systems.”