Sony Music Entertainment filed a new lawsuit against Udio in a New York federal court, accusing the AI music generation company of infringing copyright on more than 30,000 sound recordings ranging from Elvis Presley's "Hound Dog" to Beyoncé's "Say My Name" and Harry Styles' "As It Was" (The Verge).

The filings are the latest escalation in a legal battle that began in June 2024, when Sony Music, Universal Music Group, and Warner Records jointly sued Udio (corporately, Uncharted Labs, Inc.) and Suno in separate federal courts — Udio in the Southern District of New York, Suno in Boston (RIAA). The Udio case is docketed as UMG Recordings, Inc. v. Uncharted Labs, Inc., case number 1:24-cv-04777 (CourtListener).

Sony identified the additional songs using audio fingerprinting — a technique that creates a unique digital identifier from an audio file's acoustic properties, similar to how Shazam recognizes a song from a short clip. The label gained access to Udio's training data through discovery, the pre-trial legal process where each side must share relevant evidence. On or about May 25, 2026, Sony filed a motion to expand its claims, seeking to add exactly 30,442 sound recordings to the original lawsuit (Digital Music News; Music Business Worldwide). A judge rejected that motion, leaving the scope of the original case at 333 works. Sony's new complaint appears to pursue the full catalog of allegedly infringed recordings through a separate filing rather than the rejected expansion motion.

Udio has acknowledged that its generative AI models were built by training on a vast corpus of sound recordings, including audio sourced from YouTube (The Verge). Sony is asking the court to block Udio from infringing its works and is seeking statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work infringed.

The lawsuit landscape around Udio has shifted substantially over the past year. Universal Music Group settled its copyright infringement case with Udio on October 30, 2025, and the two companies announced plans to collaborate on a new music creation and streaming platform (AP News). Warner Music Group followed on November 19, 2025, settling its own claims and similarly planning a joint platform with Udio (Reuters).

Sony now stands as the sole major label still in active litigation against Udio. The divergence in strategy is stark: UMG and WMG chose licensing and partnership over continued litigation, while Sony has doubled down, filing a fresh complaint after its procedural attempt to expand the original case was rebuffed.

The audio fingerprinting evidence deserves attention. In AI copyright cases, the training data has long been the bottleneck for plaintiffs — it is opaque to outsiders, defendants are reluctant to disclose it, and without access, infringement claims rest on arguing that an AI output sounds like a copyrighted track rather than proving the original was used. Sony's ability to run fingerprinting across Udio's actual training corpus changes the evidentiary posture. Instead of arguing that an AI output sounds like a Beyoncé recording, Sony can point to the original recording sitting in the training set itself. That is a categorically stronger claim.

The judge's refusal to let Sony fold 30,442 recordings into the existing case is also consequential. The original 2024 complaint named 333 works. Expanding by two orders of magnitude mid-litigation would have reshaped the entire proceeding — potentially overwhelming Udio's defense and ballooning the scope of evidence-sharing. By keeping the case at 333 works, the court signaled a preference for manageable scope. Sony's response, filing a new lawsuit, is a bet that a separate complaint can reach the full catalog without running afoul of the same procedural constraint.

The damages math alone gives the new filing weight. At up to $150,000 per work across 30,000-plus recordings, the theoretical exposure exceeds $4.5 billion — though statutory damages in practice depend on whether infringement is found to be willful, whether each work was registered with the copyright office before infringement, and how the judge exercises discretion.

The broader context here is a split among the three major labels on how to deal with generative AI music. Two have chosen the licensing path. Sony has chosen the courtroom. Whether that produces a legal precedent on training-data copyright — or simply a settlement on terms Sony finds more acceptable than what UMG and WMG negotiated — will shape how AI music companies approach training data acquisition for years to come. The outcome also bears on the parallel case against Suno in Boston, which proceeds on similar legal theories but without the fingerprinting evidence that Sony's discovery produced against Udio.