Universal and Sony sue Suno for second time over v6 AI model
Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment have taken AI music company Suno back to court.
The two majors filed a joint complaint against Suno on 18 September in Boston federal court, in a second copyright case centred on Suno’s new v6 model suite. The labels are seeking a court order to stop any further use of their recordings and have demanded a jury trial, according to Music Business Worldwide.
At the heart of the filing is a specific number. The complaint accuses Suno of copying 60,202 sound recordings, meaning the actual recorded tracks owned by the labels, without a licence. It says Suno then used those copies to build the models that power its music generation service, which lets users create songs from text prompts.
The dispute turns on v6, which Suno launched on 9 September. Suno has presented v6 as a fresh start, built in partnership with Warner Music Group, BMG and Believe, and has also launched a new label backed by the model. Suno chief product officer Jack Brody said v6 was trained entirely from scratch on data that does not include data from Universal or Sony.
Universal and Sony reject that account. The complaint alleges that Suno has admitted training v6 using “user interactions” with earlier versions of its system. Those interactions, the labels say, are outputs and preference data from older models that were themselves trained on unlicensed copyrighted recordings, including the plaintiffs’ tracks.
Suno’s service generates two tracks per prompt and records which one the user picks. That choice becomes preference data used to shape development of v6, the complaint says. Training a “new” model on the outputs of an infringing model does not wipe away the infringement, the labels argue, describing v6 as “the fruit of the same poisoned tree”.
The money figures in the filing are large. US copyright law sets damages for wilful infringement at up to $150,000 per work. At that ceiling, 60,202 recordings would carry a theoretical maximum of just over $9 billion, although no court has awarded that sum. Universal and Sony are also asking for up to $2,500 for each act of circumventing YouTube’s anti-downloading technology. Applied once to each recording at issue, that claim would add roughly $150 million.
What makes this stand out is the split now opening up among the majors. Warner Records had joined Sony and Universal as plaintiffs when the big labels first sued Suno and Udio in June 2024, alleging the AI products were trained on copyrighted music, as reported by Reuters and The New York Times. Warner is now named by Suno as a v6 partner, while Universal and Sony are suing over v6.
