Photo Credit: Lucas van Oort
Suno investor Menlo Ventures has been slapped with a subpoena, and now, one of its former execs will soon be deposed over a tweet that could undermine the platform’s longstanding fair use defense.
Technically, the Menlo subpoena showdown fueled a motion to compel in mid-October, marking the latest in a line of demands for documents and testimonies amid Suno’s high-stakes legal battle with the non-Warner majors.
As we broke down one week ago, fellow Suno investor Lightspeed Venture Partners is likewise fending off a subpoena push. And in short, the majors are seeking similar information, pertaining to due diligence, the entity’s relationship with Suno (and in particular CEO Mikey Shulman), analyses of “actual or potential legal exposure” on the copyright side, and more, from Menlo.
Meanwhile, as of today, former Menlo principal C.C. Gong is set to be deposed within 30 days.
Admittedly, against the backdrop of rapid-fire subpoenas – and with the trend of targeting info from non-parties already in full swing – the development didn’t come out of left field.
However, it’s especially interesting for a couple reasons. First, in the litigating majors’ words, when corresponding about the sought testimony, Menlo in late September and early October “did not deny” that Gong was an employee.
Fast forward to October 12th, when Universal Music and Sony Music say “Menlo’s counsel informed” them “for the first time that Ms. Gong had left Menlo at the end of September.” Unsurprisingly, the development prompted the newly approved deposition subpoena.
The defendant didn’t oppose said subpoena, but it did request that the plaintiffs include a statement in their filing, noting therein that a motion to quash could be forthcoming from Menlo and Gong themselves.
“Suno therefore defers to the Court as to whether Plaintiffs should be permitted to pursue their subpoena to Ms. Gong, which followed Plaintiffs’ subpoena to Menlo Ventures by 53 days, and was served 12 days after the deadline for the close of fact discovery not implicated by Plaintiffs’ § 1201 claim.
“Suno takes no position on the subpoena’s propriety and does not intend to limit any objection Ms. Gong or Menlo Ventures may raise, including by motion to quash,” the business penned in part.
As for the second and more interesting reason: The testimony will center on a since-deleted tweet, posted by Gong in February 2026, about how she’d “personally shifted most” of her listening from Spotify to the AI music platform.
“I’ve personally shifted most of my listening to Suno,” the relevant post reads in part. “I was so tired of Spotify giving me the same overplayed recommendations. When everyone can create, the catalog becomes infinite and music becomes more personalized. Instead of competing for mainstream hits, AI unlocks an ever-expanding long tail, meaning everyone can find their song, not just a song.”
Several users promptly responded about the post’s perceived likelihood of factoring into the suits against Suno; it’s not a secret that the company has from the outset offered a fair use defense and attempted to refute the idea that its outputs are harming the market for actual music.
At a minimum, a top investor’s public tweet about switching to machine-generated audio won’t help the key argument. Now, all eyes are, of course, on the deposition itself.
On the opposite side of the clash, as they attempt to counter the royalty-dilution and market-replacement claim, Suno and Udio have filed a motion to compel the production of a mountain of DSP play-volume data from the Mechanical Licensing Collective.
What’s one more subpoena showdown? Earlier in October, Universal Music and Sony Music quietly submitted a motion to compel DistroKid’s production of documents in connection with their Suno suit. (The majors, many already know, are also suing the distributor.)
Per the filing entities, they’re seeking “monthly aggregate counts of the recordings DistroKid delivered, tested with its AI-detection tool, and scored as likely AI generated, together with their streams and royalties” – besides “the tool’s name and vendor, when DistroKid adopted it, whether it attributes recordings to a particular AI service, and what DistroKid knows about its accuracy.”
The distributor “refuses to produce a single document about the AI-detection tool, resting on objections that recast the underlying action as exclusively implicating how Suno trained its generative AI models, without regard to Suno’s fair use defense and the related market impact analysis,” according to the plaintiffs.
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