Nine days after Suno launched v6 — the version it pitched as a clean break, trained on licensed music — Universal Music Group and Sony Music took it back to court. Every song on this site was made with Suno, and we credit it openly on every release, so this isn't someone else's industry drama to us. It's a live question about the tool our whole catalogue sits on. Here's what the new case actually argues, what Suno says back, and what's still genuinely unresolved.
The Short Version
On Friday 18 September 2026, the two labels filed a joint complaint in federal court in Boston. It alleges Suno copied 60,202 of their sound recordings without a licence and used them to build the models behind its generator — and says even that figure understates the real number. The labels want the court to stop Suno using their recordings, and they've asked for a jury. On paper the damages are enormous: US law allows up to $150,000 per wilfully infringed work, which across that many recordings tops $9 billion in theory, plus a separate claim for getting around YouTube's download protection that could add around $150 million more. Those are ceilings, not predictions — but they show how seriously the labels are pressing this.
Why There's a Second Case at All
The original lawsuit dates back to June 2024, when Universal, Sony and Warner jointly sued Suno. Warner has since settled and signed a licensing deal, leaving the other two. That first case only names 560 recordings — the labels say that's because they couldn't see Suno's training data at the time. During discovery, they used audio-fingerprinting firm Audible Magic to match their catalogue against it, then asked to add roughly 61,000 more tracks. In August, Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV declined, saying it would slow down a case he wants to settle on the fair-use question, but left the door open for a separate suit. This is that suit, and it's landed in front of the same judge.
The New Argument: v6 Didn't Start Clean
The genuinely new part is aimed at v6. At launch, Suno said the new models were trained from scratch, built alongside Warner, BMG and Believe, and didn't use Universal or Sony material. The labels' answer is that it doesn't matter where v6's audio came from if its lessons came from older models built on their music. Their headline phrase is that v6 is "the fruit of the same poisoned tree" — in other words, retraining on the output of a model that learned from their recordings just passes the same value along a longer chain.
They make that case two ways. First, Suno has said v6 learned from users' interactions with earlier versions. Suno gives you two takes per prompt and records which one you keep; the labels argue those choices, and the songs themselves, are products of the older models. Second, they allege — on information and belief, meaning they're inferring rather than proving it yet — that Suno used knowledge distillation, a technique where a new "student" model is trained to mimic an older "teacher". If the teacher learned to write and arrange from their catalogue, the argument goes, so has the student. The complaint lists every Suno model from v4 through v5.5 as trained on the same material, and points out Suno has never said it deleted the copies.
Turning Suno's Deals Against It
Suno's main defence in the first case is fair use — that training on recordings is a behind-the-scenes process that produces something new. One thing courts weigh in fair use is whether the use harms the market for the original work. The labels point to Suno's own licensing run — Warner in November 2025, BMG in August, Believe in September — as proof that a market for training licences exists, and that Suno knows permission is needed. Suno's product chief has described those deals as not really being about data; the complaint dismisses that as convenient framing.
The labels also argue the harm is already happening, citing Deezer's figure from July that AI-generated tracks now make up more than half of what's uploaded to it each day — around 90,000 songs. Every one of those, they say, competes with human-made recordings for listeners' attention and for a share of the same royalty pot.
What Suno Says
Suno has called the claims fundamentally flawed, both factually and legally. Its position is that v6 was trained on three things: music licensed from its partners, what its community does on the platform, and its own team's accumulated know-how. Notably, its statement described that community input as including users' actual creations alongside their preference choices — which appears to be the first time Suno has said outright that generated songs, not just clicks, went into v6. On the separate complaint about artist-name prompts, Suno says it converts a named artist into the underlying musical qualities, so people learn the vocabulary of music rather than copy someone. In the first case, it has already admitted pulling audio from YouTube with the tool yt-dlp, while maintaining that training on it is fair use.
Why This Matters to Us
A few things here land close to home. If v6 did learn from users' creations and choices, that includes people like us — Suno's terms have long given it a broad, permanent licence over what users make, including for improving its models. So the tracks and the "keep this one" decisions behind this catalogue may well be part of the chain the labels are describing. We don't think that makes anyone who uses Suno a wrongdoer; it's simply how the product has always worked, and it's worth knowing.
The bigger question is one the whole AI industry has so far avoided having answered in court: does training a new model on an old model's output reset the legal slate, or does the original problem travel with it? Nothing has been decided yet. Discovery in the first case is due to close at the end of September, and a similar fight is running against Udio, which has since licensed most of the majors except Sony. We're not lawyers, and we won't pretend to know how a jury will see it.
What we can control is being honest about how our music gets made. That's why this project is credited as exactly what it is — one human and an AI collaborator — and why we flagged v6's licensed training as a meaningful step in our look at what v6 changes. We'll keep following the case and update here when something actually gets decided.
Source reporting: Music Business Worldwide, with Suno's response as reported by MBW.
