AI companies have been warned that they should not use Warner Music Group (WMG) content to train their AI models without the company's permission.

A WMG letter (pdf) stated that AI needs to “respect the rights of all those involved in the creation, marketing, promotion, and distribution of music", and that AI companies must secure a licence to train or develop AI technologies with their content.

Specifically, the letter says that "All parties must obtain an express license from WMG to use (including, but not limited to, reproducing, distributing, publicly performing, ripping, scraping, crawling, mining, recording, altering, making extractions of, or preparing derivative works of) any creative works owned or controlled by WMG or to link to or ingest such creative works in connection with the creation of datasets, as inputs for any machine learning or AI technologies, or to train or develop any machine learning or AI technologies (including by automated means)."

The move follows similar actions by Sony Music Group, reacting to an EU regulation allowing data mining of legally accessible works unless explicitly opted out, and a lawsuit by all three major music labels against AI music generators, Suno and Udio, for copyright infringement by training with their content without licensing.