Tech giant Nvidia is facing a lawsuit over accusations that it trained its AI music models Fugatto and Audio Flamingo on a copyrighted trove of songs without permission.

In a case filed Monday (June 22) in federal court, a Belgian music licensing platform called Jamendo claimed that Nvidia — the world’s most valuable company — had “blatantly disregarded” its rights by exploiting the company’s database of songs.

Jamendo, which sells access to royalty-free music, makes its catalog available for research and academic use, but its lawyers say that clearly does not extend to allowing a trillion-dollar company to train AI models.

“Nvidia has achieved unprecedented financial success through the commercialization of AI technologies built on large-scale datasets, such as [Jamendo’s],” the company’s lawyers write in their complaint, obtained by Billboard. “Yet it declined to compensate or even meaningfully engage with Jamendo regarding the use of its dataset, highlighting a stark disconnect between profit and accountability.”

A spokesperson for Nvidia did not immediately return a request for comment.

The case is one of many over AI training, which uses millions of existing works to teach models how to create new ones. Book authors, newspapers, visual artists, movie studios and record labels have all sued AI firms, claiming that process infringes their copyrights; AI companies say it’s instead covered as a form of legal fair use. Billions in potential damages and licenses turn on that unresolved legal battle.

Nvidia, better known for building AI hardware like chips, announced Audio Flamingo in 2024, followed last year by Music Flamingo, both of which are AI models designed to analyze and understand audio. In late 2024, the company announced Fugatto, an AI music generator similar to Suno that Nvidia called a “Swiss Army knife for sound.”

At the time, Nvidia said Fugatto was trained on open-source datasets under the Creative Commons license and thus complies with copyright law. And earlier this year, Universal Music Group announced a partnership with Nvidia centered on Music Flamingo, hailing it as a form of “responsible AI.”

But in Monday’s lawsuit, Jamendo alleges that Nvidia’s models are not quite as legally-trained as the company has claimed.

The accusations center on the “MTG-Jamendo Dataset,” a collection of 55,000 songs that the music company says it created in partnership with a Spanish university for research purposes. Jamendo says it publicly shared the dataset on the internet, but with the explicit warning that it was “solely for non-commercial research and academic use” and not for “any commercial use.”

“Jamendo has been approached by multiple companies seeking access… for AI-related uses,” the company writes. “Jamendo has not granted licenses for use directly comparable to the large-scale commercial training of generative AI systems, such as Fugatto and Audio Flamingo, without a specific negotiated agreement and compensation structure.”

Despite those restrictions, Jamendo says Nvidia clearly used its dataset to train those models. The lawsuit says Nvidia’s public statements “expressly identify MTG-Jamendo as one of the datasets Nvidia utilized for its Fugatto and Audio Flamingo products.”

Notably, those accusations center not on Nvidia’s alleged use of the individual copyrighted songs, but of the selection and arrangement of Jamendo’s overall database. The company claims that its carefully-curated catalog, complete with metadata and “tagging frameworks,” is itself a separate copyrighted work that’s extremely valuable to an AI platform.

“Nvidia obtained substantial value, including immediate access to a large, organized, and commercially useful music catalogue,” the company writes. “Nvidia also avoided the time, cost, and effort required to independently source, clean, organize, and validate comparable data, including the value inherent in the dataset’s structured organization and curated metadata.”

In a statement Tuesday (June 23), Jamendo owner Winamp Group said its actions “reflect our commitment to protecting the rights of Jamendo and the artists who entrust us with the commercialization of their work.”

“As artificial intelligence continues to transform the music industry, we believe it is essential that creators and rights holders are properly recognized, compensated and protected,” Winamp CEO Alexandre Saboundjian says.

The filing of the case comes after Jamendo publicly threatened legal action against both Nvidia and Suno, the market-leading AI music firm that has faced protracted litigation from the major labels. Jamendo has already brought a case against Nvidia in Belgian court, where it remains pending; it has not yet taken any action against Suno.

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