Suno released its new AI music model earlier this month – drawing attention to its key label partnerships with Warner Music Group, BMG and Believe.
But any idea that the music industry is on board with Suno has today been dispelled by further legal action against the AI firm by Universal Music Group and Sony Music alleging copyright infringement.
In the US District Court of Massachusetts filing, the legal claim from the majors lists 60,202 sound recordings in the action – but adds that the “scope of Suno’s infringement goes far beyond” this number.
“This is the second action brought by two record companies and their affiliates to vindicate their rights in the enormous number of copyrighted sound recordings that Suno copied without permission to train the commercial artificial intelligence (‘AI’) models that power its generative AI service,” stated the legal complaint.
The latest lawsuit has arrived two years after all three major music companies first initiated action against Suno alleging copyright infringement. Warner Music later settled with Suno and is now a licensing partner.
The UMG and Sony Music legal action follows the release of Suno’s new v6 model just nine days ago.
“Suno has admitted that it trained v6 using ‘user interactions’ with previous iterations of its models,” stated the filing from UMG, Sony Music and their label affiliates. “But these ‘interactions’ are the outputs of, and preference data derived from, Suno’s prior models, each of which was trained on the unlicensed corpus of copyrighted sound recordings described above, including Plaintiffs’ Copyrighted Recordings.”
The lawsuit states the Suno’s v6 release was trained on the same corpus of sound recordings as previous models, meaning that “it is a product of those tainted models and of the unauthorised copies of Plaintiffs’ recordings that Suno retains and continues to use”.
“Training a ‘new’ model on the outputs of an infringing model does not eliminate the infringement; it launders it, passing the value of Plaintiffs’ expression from the copied recordings into the tainted models, from those models into their outputs, and from those outputs into v6,” the filing states. “V6 is not a fresh start; it is the fruit of the same poisoned tree.”
V6 is not a fresh start; it is the fruit of the same poisoned tree
UMG & Sony Music legal claim
It also alleges that the v6 model “rests on a foundation of unauthorised copies of Plaintiffs’ works that Suno continues to hold and exploit”.
The legal filing concludes: “The harm Suno is causing goes far beyond these immediate economic consequences. Suno’s wholesale theft of the Copyrighted Recordings threatens the entire music ecosystem and the numerous people it employs.
“It also degrades the rights of artists to control their works, determine whether future uses of their works align with their aesthetic and personal values, and decide the products or services with which they wish to be associated.
“And it propagates the destructive theory that copyrighted music is free for the taking whenever a new technology claims that seeking and obtaining permission is just too cumbersome.”
"These claims remain fundamentally flawed on both the facts and the law," said a Suno spokesperson. "What remains unchanged is that Suno exists so that more people can make new music. Every song on Suno begins with a person and an idea. When someone asks for a particular artist, we translate that into the musical qualities behind the request - not so that a user can imitate someone else’s work, but so that people learn the language of music and make something of their own.
"Over the past two years, we have doubled down on this goal, launching v6 in partnership with WMG, BMG, and Believe. 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."
Suno has faced multiple copyright claims from music companies and rights-holders, including losing a major copyright claim with GEMA in Germany in July, as well as facing opposition from artist groups.
It has also secured agreements with BMG and Believe in the past month, following its Warner Music deal in November 2025.
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