Universal and Sony Sue Suno Again Over AI Models, Citing

Universal and Sony sue Suno for a second time, claiming platform’s v6 models are ‘the fruit of the same poisoned tree’

September 18, 2026 By Tim Ingham

Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment have sued Suno for a second time.

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The joint complaint, filed on Friday (September 18) in Boston federal court , accuses the AI music company of copying 60,202 of the labels’ sound recordings, without a license, and using them to build the models that run its music generation service.

The new filing against Suno , obtained by MBW , can be read in full here .

US copyright law sets damages for willful infringement at up to USD $150,000 per work.

At that ceiling, the 60,202 recordings would carry a theoretical maximum of just over $9 billion .

The labels are also asking for up to $2,500 for each act of circumventing YouTube ‘s anti-downloading technology, which is the maximum US law allows on that separate claim.

Applied once to each of the 60,202 recordings, that would add roughly $150 million .

Universal and Sony are also seeking a court order stopping Suno from any further use of their recordings, and have demanded a jury trial.

The complaint’s central new allegation concerns v6 , the model suite Suno launched on September 9 .

Suno says v6 was built in partnership with Warner Music Group , BMG , and Believe .

Chief Product Officer Jack Brody told MBW at launch that “v6 was trained entirely from scratch, from the ground up,” on data that “doesn’t include data from Universal or Sony.”

The labels argue that this does not wipe out Suno ‘s liability because, they allege, v6 was built on the output of models trained on their recordings.

“Training a ‘new’ model on the outputs of an infringing model does not eliminate the infringement; it launders it, passing the value of Plaintiffs’ expression from the copied recordings into the tainted models, from those models into their outputs, and from those outputs into v6 ,” the complaint states. “…v6 is not a fresh start; it is the fruit of the same poisoned tree.”

> “Training a ‘new’ model on the outputs of an infringing model does not eliminate the infringement; it launders it.” Universal and Sony’s new suit

On the data used to build the new models, the filing alleges: “ Suno has admitted that it trained v6 using ‘user interactions’ with previous iterations of its models.

“But these ‘interactions’ are the outputs of, and preference data derived from, Suno’s prior models, each of which was trained on the unlicensed corpus of copyrighted sound recordings described above, including Plaintiffs’ Copyrighted Recordings.”

(Suno generates two tracks per prompt. The “preference data” is its record of which one the user picks in each case – data it’s used to inform the development of V6.)

“To date, every such signal has been a judgment about audio outputs generated using Suno ‘s unlicensed models – that is, synthetic outputs embodying the expressive features that Suno’s tainted models derived from Plaintiffs’ recordings,” the complaint states.

The filing also alleges that Suno built v6 using knowledge distillation, a process it describes as one “whereby a new ‘student’ model is trained to reproduce the learned behavior of a predecessor ‘teacher’ model.”

“Here, the ‘teachers’ are Suno ‘s prior models, and the capabilities they transmit – how to compose, arrange, and render convincing imitations of human-created music across genres and styles – were derived from the unlicensed recordings on which those models trained, including Plaintiffs’ Copyrighted Recordings,” the complaint reads. “…v6’s training corpus, in substance, embodies the accumulated learnings of models built on Plaintiffs’ works.”

> “the capabilities Suno’s prior models transmit [to V6] – how to compose, arrange, and render convincing imitations of human-created music across genres and styles – were derived from the unlicensed recordings on which those models trained.” Accusation in Universal and Sony suit

The filing names v4 , v4.5 , v4.5+ , v5 , v4.5-all , and v5.5 as trained on the same copied corpus.

“Thus, every model Suno has ever released – from its earliest versions through v6 – is the product of, and continues to exploit, Suno’s unauthorized copying of the Copyrighted Recordings,” the complaint states.

The filing adds that Suno has never said it destroyed the recordings it copied: “v6 thus rests on a foundation of unauthorized copies of Plaintiffs’ works that Suno continues to hold and exploit…”

The complaint additionally turns Suno ‘s own deals against it.

The company settled with Warner Music Group in November 2025 , signed BMG on August 12 , and announced a partnership with Believe on September 8 .

“Three agreements with three major rightsholders in less than a year confirm that a functioning market exists for licensing sound recordings to train generative AI models and that Suno itself recognizes that using copyrighted sound recordings for this purpose requires permission,” the filing reads.

That matters because Suno ‘s core defense is that training a model on copyrighted material is ‘fair use’, and one factor a court weighs is the potential market damage such a practice might inflict on the original works.

The complaint quotes Brody saying the revenue share with partners is “not in exchange for training” and that the deals are “not really about the data”.

It calls that characterization “self-serving.”

On market harm, the complaint points to Deezer , which said in July 2026 that more than half of new tracks arriving on its platform each day were AI-generated, at around 90,000 a day.

“Every machine-generated track delivered to a streaming service competes with the Copyrighted Recordings for placement, for discovery, for finite listener attention, and for a share of the fixed royalty pools from which genuine artists and rightsholders are paid,” the filing states.

“Dilution at this scale and velocity is not just a future harm; it is a present, measured, and accelerating one.”

> “Dilution at this scale and velocity is not just a future harm; it is a present, measured, and accelerating one.” Universal and Sony’s new suit

Setting out the wider harm, the complaint states: “ Suno ‘s wholesale theft of the Copyrighted Recordings threatens the entire music ecosystem and the numerous people it employs.

“It also degrades the rights of artists to control their works, determine whether future uses of their works align with their aesthetic and personal values, and decide the products or services with which they wish to be associated.”

The same passage quotes Suno co-founder and CEO Mikey Shulman saying: “[i]t’s not really enjoyable to make music now…[i]t takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software.”

“The time, practice, and skill Mr. Shulman derides are exactly what copyright law exists to encourage and reward, and exactly what spurred the creation of the Copyrighted Recordings Suno copied and ingested into its AI models,” the complaint states.

This second case has been triggered by a recent ruling in UMG and Sony ‘s first case against Suno , originally filed in June 2024 .

The two majors had asked to add 61,026 recordings to that original lawsuit against Suno , which covers 560 works.

Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV refused that request on August 18 , ruling that the extra works would delay a case he wants decided on fair use, and noting that the labels could bring them as a separate suit.

“Because Suno concealed the contents of its training data, the complaint in the previous action identified a minuscule, illustrative fraction of the recordings Suno had actually copied,” the new complaint states.

“Though the 60,202 sound recordings asserted in this action may more closely reflect the breadth of Suno’s infringement, in reality they remain only a small portion of Plaintiffs’ works that Suno infringed.”

The labels say they pinpointed their works inside Suno ‘s training data using audio fingerprinting company Audible Magic , during discovery in the first case.

In the first case brought against it by Universal and Sony , Suno argues that training its models on copyrighted recordings is “quintessential fair use.” It admitted in a September 1 filing that it obtained audio from YouTube using the tool YT-DLP .

Fact discovery in that case closes on September 30 . Music Business Worldwide

_Originally reported by [Music Business Worldwide](https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/universal-and-sony-sue-suno-for-a-second-time-claiming-platforms-v6-models-are-the-fruit-of-the-same-poisoned-tree/)._