Sony Music has filed a new lawsuit against Udio, a company that makes AI software capable of creating music. Sony says Udio used 30,117 recordings without permission to teach its AI how to generate songs. The filing comes after a court rejected Sony's request on June 29 to add those recordings to an earlier lawsuit it had already filed against the company. Engadget, citing Music Business Worldwide as the first outlet to report the development, confirmed the details on July 21. Billboard and Digital Music News published parallel reports on July 20. Billboard described the new action as expanding the scope of Sony's claims against Udio.

Here is the background. In June 2024, Sony Music, Universal Music Group, and Warner Music Group sued Udio together in a New York federal court. On the same day, they also sued another AI music startup called Suno in a Boston federal court. Both cases accused the AI companies of copying recorded music without permission to train their software. Training, in this context, means feeding large amounts of existing audio into an AI system so it can learn musical patterns and produce new songs. Reuters. Suno and Udio filed their responses in court on August 1, 2024. Reuters.

The new Sony lawsuit stands out for two reasons: the large number of songs involved and the legal process that led to it. The 30,117 recordings were not included in the original 2024 case. Sony tried to add them, but the court said no on June 29. The judge ruled that "plaintiffs have the right to seek to stop infringement of, and recover damages for, all copyrighted works." In plain terms, Sony was told it could still go after those recordings, just not by tacking them onto the old case. The new lawsuit is how Sony is doing that.

Sony is asking for a jury trial and damages of up to $150,000 per song. If the court awarded the maximum for all 30,117 recordings, the total could reach about $4.5 billion. In practice, courts rarely apply the maximum amount across thousands of works, so the actual figure would likely be lower.

The complaint also says Udio got its training audio by downloading recordings from YouTube. The Verge obtained a list of the songs involved, which include tracks by Alicia Keys, Dolly Parton, Elvis Presley, Beyoncé, Bob Dylan, Britney Spears, and Michael Jackson.

Sony is now the only one of the three original record labels still fighting Udio in court. Universal Music Group settled its dispute with Udio in October 2025. Reuters. Warner Music Group followed in November 2025, settling its case and announcing plans to build a new platform together with Udio. Reuters. Both deals left Sony as the only major label still suing the AI company.

The specific court where Sony filed the new lawsuit and the exact filing date have not been publicly identified in the reporting available. The original 2024 case was filed in New York federal court, but whether the new action was filed in the same place has not been confirmed.

The broader context here is that the major record labels have taken different paths with AI music companies. Universal and Warner chose to settle and partner with Udio. Sony chose the opposite, filing a brand new lawsuit covering far more songs than the original case. The gap between the 2024 joint filing and Sony's new case in mid-2026 reflects more than two years of legal back-and-forth, during which Udio's two other label opponents became business partners.

The June 29 court ruling is worth flagging for what it tells us about where AI copyright lawsuits are headed. The court did not say Sony could not pursue claims over the 30,117 recordings. It only said Sony had to file them the right way. That matters because it suggests the real question is not whether copyright holders can go after AI companies for using their music, but how they must structure their lawsuits to keep them alive. For AI developers, this means that winning a procedural round does not mean the fight is over. The other side can simply come back with a new complaint, as Sony did here.

For the AI music world specifically, Sony's decision to file a second lawsuit after two years, while its rivals have moved on to licensing deals, raises a practical question about how the market will shake out. Udio now has licensing agreements covering Universal and Warner catalogs but still faces a massive Sony claim covering some of the most popular songs of the past several decades. How that imbalance affects Udio's product, its music library, and its ability to compete with Suno, which faces its own unresolved label lawsuits, is an open question.

The original 2024 lawsuits were announced by the RIAA, the trade group for the recording industry, as landmark cases for responsible AI. The labels framed them as efforts to establish that training AI on copyrighted recordings requires permission and licensing. RIAA. Sony's second filing keeps that argument in court even as two of the three original plaintiffs decided that licensing, not litigation, was the faster way forward.