Universal and Sony sue Suno again over 60,202 recordings they say still shape v6
The labels answer Suno's from-scratch claim for v6 by arguing the model learned from the outputs and preference data of earlier models trained on 60,202 of their recordings. The statutory ceiling reaches $9.03bn.
The Investor · Invest desk
What happened
- Universal and Sony's second complaint against Suno accuses the company of copying 60,202 of their sound recordings without a licence and using them to build the models that run its service.
- The joint filing landed on Friday, September 18 in Boston federal court, and is the two labels' second suit against the AI music company.
- The new allegation targets v6, the model suite Suno launched on September 9 and says it built in partnership with Warner Music Group, BMG and Believe.
Why it matters
- What it costs cost Suno is the party exposed: at the ceilings the labels cite, the two claims top out at $9,180,805,000, and any negotiated settlement is discounted from there.
- Who's exposed exposure Warner, BMG and Believe are commercial partners in the model at the centre of the case, and their deals do not answer for copies the complaint says Suno still holds.
- What it limits constraint If outputs and preference data inherit a corpus's licensing status, retraining stops being a clean exit from an infringement claim without proof of where the new data came from.
- What it sets up precedent Distillation lineage becomes a discovery target: a plaintiff who wins this reading can ask any student model to account for what its teacher was trained on.
Next story · Product · Sep 18
Sony and UMG target the user preference data behind Suno's licensed v6 modelsConfirmed2 publishers
Suno generates two tracks for every prompt, and the record of which one the user keeps is the preference data the company fed back into development [22]. The complaint says Suno has admitted it trained v6 using "user interactions" with previous iterations of its models [21]. It adds that no such interaction is clean: "every such signal has been a judgment about audio outputs generated using Suno's unlicensed models," the filing states [23].
The filing also alleges v6 was built through knowledge distillation, which it describes as a process "whereby a new 'student' model is trained to reproduce the learned behavior of a predecessor 'teacher' model" [24]. It names v4, v4.5, v4.5+, v5, v4.5-all and v5.5 as trained on the same copied corpus [10]. Its conclusion is that "every model Suno has ever released ... is the product of, and continues to exploit, Suno's unauthorized copying of the Copyrighted Recordings" [16]. The filing also says Suno has never stated that it destroyed the copies [11].
The 45-page complaint asks for two kinds of money [2]. At the willful-infringement ceiling of $150,000 a work [6], 60,202 recordings come to $9,030,300,000 [17]. The circumvention claim at $2,500, applied once to each recording, adds $150,505,000 [18], for $9,180,805,000 [19]. Music Business Worldwide, which obtained the filing, gives those as just over $9 billion and roughly $150 million [14][15]. The statute prices acts of circumvention, not works [7], so that second line moves with the download logs.
Warner Music Group settled with Suno in November 2025, BMG signed on August 12, and the Believe partnership was announced on September 8 [12]; v6 launched the next day [3]. Universal and Sony filed nine days after the launch [20]. Suno did not have an immediate comment, Variety reported [13].
Jack Brody, Suno's chief product officer, said at launch that "v6 was trained entirely from scratch, from the ground up," on data that "doesn't include data from Universal or Sony" [9]. The labels answer that the lineage carries the liability. "Training a 'new' model on the outputs of an infringing model does not eliminate the infringement; it launders it," the complaint states. And: "v6 is not a fresh start; it is the fruit of the same poisoned tree" [4].
A court can read a model's outputs as new expression. Then the lineage argument fails, and the two labels are back to the original copying claim that brought them to Boston the first time [1]. It can instead hold that what a teacher model transmits carries the licensing status of what that teacher learned from [24]. On that reading, a licence signed this year buys future use and leaves the copies Suno is alleged to still hold unpriced [11]. Or Suno settles, and the negotiation begins by discounting $9,180,805,000 [19]. I think the third is likeliest. The fact that would undercut the labels is a screening record: if Suno can show v6's preference data excluded outputs traceable to the 60,202 recordings, the laundering theory loses its factual basis [5].
What to watch
- Whether Suno moves to dismiss on the ground that model outputs are new expression, or answers with a screening record for v6's preference data.
- Whether Warner Music Group, BMG or Believe restate or amend their Suno deals now that v6's training lineage is in dispute.
- Whether the court consolidates this complaint with Universal and Sony's earlier case against Suno.
Information, not investment advice. This story is general information about companies and markets, drawn from cited reporting. It is not a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any security; check the cited sources before acting.
Clarity's read
What the record supports and how the coverage leans. The claims behind it follow.
Reality
- Evidence72
- Adoption58
- Hype gap+30
- Incentives82
- Confidence70
Claim ledger
Ranked by verification strength, evidence, and original report placement.
- [1]
Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment have sued Suno for a second time, in a joint complaint filed on Friday, September 18 in Boston federal court, accusing the AI music company of copying the labels' sound recordings without a licence to build the models running its music generation service.
- [2]
The new lawsuit runs 45 pages, was filed in the U.S. District Court in the District of Massachusetts, and names some of Sony Music's and UMG's respective imprints as fellow plaintiffs.
- [3]
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.
- [4]
The complaint states: "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 ... v6 is not a fresh start; it is the fruit of the same poisoned tree."
- [5]
The complaint alleges Suno copied 60,202 of the labels' sound recordings, without a license, and used them to build the models that run its music generation service.
- [6]
US copyright law sets damages for willful infringement at up to USD $150,000 per work.
- [7]
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.
- [8]
Universal and Sony are seeking a court order stopping Suno from any further use of their recordings, and have demanded a jury trial.
- [9]
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."
- [10]
The filing names v4, v4.5, v4.5+, v5, v4.5-all, and v5.5 as trained on the same copied corpus.
- [11]
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."
- [12]
Suno settled with Warner Music Group in November 2025, signed BMG on August 12, and announced a partnership with Believe on September 8.
- [13]
Suno did not have an immediate comment.
- [14]
At the $150,000 ceiling, the 60,202 recordings would carry a theoretical maximum of just over $9 billion, according to Music Business Worldwide, which obtained the filing.
- [15]
Applied once to each of the 60,202 recordings, the $2,500 circumvention maximum would add roughly $150 million.
- [16]
The complaint states: "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."
- [17]
60,202 recordings at the $150,000 willful-infringement ceiling is $9,030,300,000.
- [18]
The $2,500 circumvention maximum applied once to each of 60,202 recordings is $150,505,000.
- [19]
The two statutory claims at their ceilings total $9,180,805,000.
- [20]
The complaint was filed nine days after v6 launched.
- [21]
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."
- [22]
Suno generates two tracks per prompt, and the "preference data" is its record of which one the user picks in each case, data it has used to inform the development of v6.
- [23]
The complaint states: "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."
- [24]
The filing alleges 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," with Suno's prior models as the teachers transmitting capabilities derived from the unlicensed recordings.
Sources
2 independent publishers whose own reporting we read for this story.
- musicbusinessworldwide.comUniversal and Sony sue Suno for a second time, claiming platform’s v6 models are ‘the fruit of the same poisoned tree’ - Music Business Worldwide
1 article · September 18, 2026
- variety.comSony Music and UMG sue Suno, alleging that its new model trained in partnership with WMG and BMG infringes copyright because it is based on an infringing model
1 article · September 18, 2026
Topics and entities
Topics
- Synthetic Training Data
- Generative music production
- AI Copyright Litigation