Suno admits it has not deleted all the recordings used to train its AI
Suno, the AI music company, has admitted it has not deleted all the sound recordings it used to train its AI models. The admission appears in a 44-page answer filed on Tuesday, October 20, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, according to Music Business Worldwide.
The filing responds to a second lawsuit from Universal Music Group (UMG) and Sony Music, two of the three major record companies. They filed it on September 18. The labels allege that training Suno's v6 models on the outputs of earlier Suno models "launders" infringement, meaning it hides copying behind an extra step. Training is the process of feeding recordings into a system so it learns patterns from them.
Suno said in the answer that keeping its training recordings is consistent with the plaintiffs' earlier demand that it retain the data sets it used. The labels had written to Suno on April 25, 2024, asking it to stop using their copyrighted recordings and to provide a full list of the material used to build its models.
The labels' first case against Suno was filed in June 2024. The case is docketed as No. 1:24-cv-11611 in the same court, according to CourtListener. In an August 2024 answer, Suno said the relevant data had all been preserved. The October filing now concedes that not every recording has been deleted.
The new answer also covers evidence gathered in the first case. During discovery, the stage where each side examines the other's evidence, the labels inspected Suno's source code and training data. Suno admitted this. It also admitted that the labels' analysis, carried out with the audio-identification firm Audible Magic, claimed to find millions of copyrighted works in the training data. Among them were the 60,202 recordings named in the new suit.
Earlier this year, Suno made another admission. In a September 8 report, Music Business Worldwide said Suno had acknowledged obtaining YouTube audio to train its AI. Suno disputed UMG and Sony's right to bring a claim over stream-ripping, which means capturing audio from a streaming video. Suno asked the court in October 2025 to dismiss that claim.
The labels' allegations have not been tested in court, and no ruling on the new claims has been reported. For the artists and songwriters whose recordings sit in these datasets, the case is about whether their work was used and how it was obtained. Those questions are still open.
