Sony Music has filed a new copyright infringement lawsuit against AI music generator Udio, claiming the platform used 30,117 sound recordings without permission to train its models. The filing follows a June 29 court decision that rejected Sony's request to add those recordings to its original 2024 complaint 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.

The original lawsuit was filed on June 24, 2024 in New York federal court, jointly by Sony Music, Universal Music Group, and Warner Music Group. That same day, the labels also filed a separate copyright infringement action against AI music startup Suno in Boston federal court. Both cases accused the AI companies of copying recordings without authorization to train generative music models — software that learns patterns from existing audio to produce new music. Reuters. Suno and Udio filed their responses in federal court on August 1, 2024. Reuters.

What sets the new Sony filing apart is both its scale and the procedural history that forced it. The 30,117 recordings at issue were not part of the original complaint. Sony sought to add them, but the court barred the amendment on June 29, ruling that "plaintiffs have the right to seek to stop infringement of, and recover damages for, all copyrighted works." That language effectively told Sony it could pursue the additional recordings, just not by amending the existing case. The new lawsuit is the vehicle for doing so.

Sony is demanding a trial by jury and statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work. Statutory damages are set by law rather than calculated from actual losses. At the maximum rate across all 30,117 recordings, the potential damages exposure would reach approximately $4.5 billion, though courts rarely apply the per-work maximum across thousands of works.

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

Sony's position as the sole remaining plaintiff among the original three labels is the result of settlements by its co-plaintiffs over the past year. Universal Music Group settled its copyright dispute with Udio in October 2025. Reuters. Warner Music Group followed in November 2025, settling its case and announcing plans to jointly launch a new platform with Udio. Reuters. Both deals left Sony as the only major label still litigating against the AI company.

The specific court in which 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 jurisdiction has not been confirmed.

The broader context here is one of diverging strategies among the major labels toward generative AI music platforms. UMG and WMG each chose settlement and partnership over prolonged litigation. Sony has taken the opposite path, escalating its claims by filing an entirely new case to cover a far larger body of works than the original complaint addressed. The gap between 2024's joint filing and Sony's solo escalation in mid-2026 reflects more than two years of procedural maneuvering, during which Udio's two other label adversaries became business partners.

The June 29 court ruling is worth flagging for what it signals about the trajectory of AI training-data copyright litigation. The court did not dispute Sony's right to pursue claims over the 30,117 recordings; it constrained the procedural mechanism. That distinction matters. It suggests the legal question is not whether copyright holders can chase downstream uses of their works in training data, but how they must structure those claims to survive procedural challenges. For AI developers, this means a plaintiff denied leave to amend is not necessarily a plaintiff who has lost on the merits. They may simply come back with a new complaint, as Sony did here.

For the AI music sector specifically, Sony's willingness to file a second lawsuit after two years of litigation, while its peers have moved on to licensing, raises a practical question about market dynamics. Udio now operates with licensing arrangements covering UMG and WMG catalogs but faces a sprawling Sony claim that encompasses some of the most commercially significant recordings of the past several decades. How that asymmetry affects Udio's product, its catalog coverage, and its competitive position against Suno, which faces its own unresolved label litigation, is an open question.

The original 2024 lawsuits were announced by the RIAA as landmark cases for responsible AI, framed by the labels as efforts to establish that AI training on copyrighted recordings requires permission and licensing. RIAA. Sony's second filing keeps that legal thesis in active litigation even as two of the three original plaintiffs have accepted the argument that licensing, not litigation, is the faster path to resolution.