Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment have sued Suno for a second time. The joint complaint, filed on Friday 18 September in Boston federal court, accuses the AI music company of copying 60,202 of the labels' sound recordings without a licence and using them to build the models behind its generation service.
The numbers are large even by the standards of this kind of case. US copyright law allows up to $150,000 per work for wilful infringement, which at the ceiling would put the theoretical maximum just over $9 billion. The labels are also claiming up to $2,500 for each act of circumventing YouTube's anti-downloading protections, roughly another $150 million if applied once per recording, and they have demanded a jury trial and an injunction.
The new argument concerns v6, the model suite Suno launched on 9 September and says it built in partnership with Warner Music Group, BMG and Believe. Suno's chief product officer Jack Brody said at launch that v6 was trained entirely from scratch on data that does not include Universal or Sony material.
The labels say that does not help. Their position is that v6 was trained on the outputs and preference data of earlier Suno models, each of which they allege was trained on their recordings. "v6 is not a fresh start; it is the fruit of the same poisoned tree," the complaint states, arguing that training a new model on an infringing model's output launders the infringement rather than removing it.
The filing also points to knowledge distillation, where a student model is trained to reproduce the behaviour of a teacher model, and names v4, v4.5, v4.5+, v5, v4.5-all and v5.5 as trained on the same copied corpus. It notes that Suno has never said it destroyed the copies it made.
Suno's own deals are being used against it. The company settled with Warner in November 2025, signed BMG on 12 August and announced a Believe partnership on 8 September. Three agreements with three major rightsholders inside a year, the labels argue, show that a licensing market exists and that Suno knows permission is required, which cuts against its fair use defence.
On market harm the complaint reaches for a number from outside the case. Deezer said in July 2026 that more than half of the new tracks arriving on its platform each day were AI-generated, at around 90,000 a day, and the labels argue that dilution at that scale is a present and measurable harm rather than a projected one.
This second case exists because of a ruling in the first. Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV refused on 18 August to let the majors add 61,026 recordings to their original June 2024 suit, which covers 560 works, on the grounds that it would delay a case he wants decided on fair use, while noting the labels could sue separately. The labels say they identified their works inside Suno's training data using the fingerprinting firm Audible Magic during discovery, and Suno admitted in a 1 September filing that it took audio from YouTube using the tool YT-DLP. Fact discovery in the first case closes on 30 September. More on this is on our business hub and legal hub, including BMG signing its own licensing deal with Suno and GEMA beating Suno in a German copyright ruling.
The facts
- Universal and Sony filed a second suit against Suno on 18 September in Boston.
- It accuses Suno of copying 60,202 sound recordings without a licence.
- At $150,000 per work the theoretical maximum passes $9 billion.
- The labels also claim up to $2,500 per act of circumventing YouTube protections.
- The complaint targets v6, which Suno launched on 9 September.
- Suno says v6 was trained from scratch without Universal or Sony data.
- The labels say v6 was trained on the outputs of earlier infringing models.
- A judge refused in August to add the recordings to the original 2024 case.
How this checks out
Single source
Reported by a single outlet
Only one outlet has reported it so far, so it stays a single source.
Cited sources 1
Every outlet that reported this, linked to what it published. Equal credits, in alphabetical order.