Labor & Employment Law Daily Wrap Up, LITIGATION NEWS, TRENDS—Union alleges Warner and Universal violated CBAs by allowing AI companies to use members’ work to train AI models, (Jun 9, 2026)

By Brandi O. Brown, J.D.

“While the Defendants protected their own interests and created a significant source of new revenue with the retrospective settlements and prospective licenses, they have refused to compensate the musicians whose work—created with their own instruments and through their talent, creativity, and hard work—is fed into AI machines for profit.”

In a new federal lawsuit filed at the end of last week, the American Federation of Musicians of the United States and Canada (AFM) alleges that Warner Music Group Corp. and Universal Music Group, Inc., two of the largest music companies in the world, have licensed sound recordings on which AFM-represented musicians have worked, without compensation or credit, to two AI companies. Meanwhile, the music companies have refused to provide information to the AFM about which recordings and whose work is being licensed, the complaint states.

In spite of past assertions. AFM contends this is particularly egregious, since, in lawsuits filed by Warner and Universal in June 2024 against those two same AI companies, alleging copyright violations for unauthorized and uncompensated use of sound recordings, the music companies had asserted that those companies were “replacing the work of human artists with massive quantities of AI created sounds... that substantially dilute the royalty pools paid out to artists.” Nevertheless, after settling with those AI companies, the music companies are receiving compensation from those AI companies and allowing them “to use the work of AFM-represented musicians to do exactly what they warned about: Training AI models to generate supposedly ‘new’ sound recordings derived from music ingested into their models.”

Breach. AFM alleges that the music companies’ failure to compensate the musicians and provide information violates their collective bargaining agreement with the AFM. “While the Defendants protected their own interests and created a significant source of new revenue with the retrospective settlements and prospective licenses,” the union alleges, “they have refused to compensate the musicians whose work—created with their own instruments and through their talent, creativity, and hard work—is fed into AI machines for profit.”

“New use” provision. Specifically, AFM alleges that its collective bargaining agreement, known as the Sound Recording Labor Agreement )SRLA), contains a “new use” provision that requires music companies to notify it of licenses and other transfers of rights in music that is to be used for purposes not covered by the SRLA and to compensate the individual musicians who worked on those recordings. These new use provisions have been around in one form or another for 80 years, it notes, and “generative AI tools constitute such a new use, one that looms over musicians’ livelihoods.”

It further alleges that in spite of this provision and in spite of the music companies’ prior acknowledgement of the threat posed by generative AI to recording artists, the music companies “have failed to compensate musicians whose music has already been ‘scraped,’ ‘ingested’ and copied, exploited, and incorporated into the development of” [footnotes omitted] the two AI companies’ AI models under the music companies’ settlement agreements with them.

The federal lawsuit was filed in the Southern District of New York; the case is No. 1:26-cv-04760-ER.

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