Sony Music Entertainment and Universal Music Group (UMG) are suing AI music generator Suno for allegedly infringing on their copyright with its newest v6 models, Variety reports. The claim challenges the story Suno has generally told about its latest AI models, which are the first it’s released since signing licensing deals with Warner Music Group and BMG.
While Suno used licensed material to create the v6 lineup, in their lawsuit (obtained by Music Business Worldwide), Sony Music and UMG specifically take issue with the company’s public acknowledgement that the models were also trained on “users’ ‘interactions’ with Suno’s service,” which they take to mean “the outputs of, and preference signals derived from, prior models that Suno built by copying Plaintiffs’ recordings without authorization.” Under that understanding, both companies claim Suno could be responsible for infringing on the copyright of at least 60,202 sound recordings. That leaves it liable for up to $9 billion in damages under US copyright law, plus up to $2,500 for each time Suno circumvented YouTube’s anti-downloading tech to scrape songs, according to MusicBusinessWorldwide.
Naturally, the company disagrees with Sony Music and UMG. “These claims remain fundamentally flawed on both the facts and the law,” the company said in a statement to Engadget, while reaffirming that “Suno exists so that more people can make new music.”
“Over the past two years, we have doubled down on this goal, launching v6 in partnership with WMG, BMG, and Believe,” the company continued. “v6 was trained on content licensed from our partners, interactions including creations and preference signals from our community, and the accumulated learnings from our team. We are excited for a future where AI and the music industry continue to strengthen one another and build entirely new product experiences for artists, fans and the broader music community.”
This new lawsuit builds on Sony Music, UMG and WMG’s previous suit against the company, and a July 2026 hack of Suno’s data that revealed the AI company scraped millions of songs and lyrics from platforms like YouTube Music, Deezer and Genius to train its earlier models. In the past, Suno has justified scraping music to train AI as falling under the fair use doctrine. Alongside the release of its v6 models, though, the company ended support for its older models, which at least suggests it thinks offering a product trained on licensed material is more palatable to critics. If a judge is swayed by record companies’ understanding of how Suno trained its models, that might not be enough.
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