UMG, Sony Music File Second Lawsuit Against Suno Over AI Music Generator’s New Model

Universal Music Group and Sony Music Group have filed a second copyright infringement lawsuit against AI music generation platform Suno, alleging that the company’s recently released v6 model — which Suno said is trained exclusively on licensed music — uses their recordings without consent.

In the suit, filed in federal court Friday, UMG and Sony claim that Suno trained its new models on “users’ interactions” with Suno’s previous models, which themselves the record companies had already alleged were trained on mass copyright infringement in their ongoing first lawsuit as well.

“Suno has also publicly acknowledged that it trained v6 on its users’ “interactions” with Suno’s service—that is, on the outputs of, and preference signals derived from, prior models that Suno built by copying Plaintiffs’ recordings without authorization,” UMG and Sony said, citing a Billboard interview Suno CEO Mikey Shulman took part in earlier in September. “Whatever the sources of v6’s training corpus, Suno built v6 by continuing to reproduce and exploit Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works without authorization or payment.”

The companies further allege that Suno “developed v6 using knowledge distillation and related model-transfer techniques, whereby a new ‘student’ model is trained to reproduce the learned behavior of a predecessor ‘teacher’ model.” Suno’s old “teacher” models in this case, “were derived from the unlicensed recordings on which those models trained, including Plaintiffs’ Copyrighted Recordings, and therefore, the new model “also inherits the value of Plaintiffs’ Copyrighted Recordings.”

Suno didn’t immediately respond to request for comment on the new lawsuit.

The suit comes two years after the major record companies sued Suno for the first time back in 2024. (Warner Music Group, the third of the “big three” major labels, joined in on the first suit at the time but has since settled and partnered with Suno.) Aside from the infringement claims themselves, UMG and Sony argue Suno is contributing to a market over-saturation on streaming services with waves of AI-generated tracks, which “directly competes with, cheapens, and ultimately drowns out the genuine sound recordings on which the service is built.”

While Sony and UMG’s latest suit reflects the fraught relationship Suno still has with the industry, the AI music platform has also carved out inroads with the music business. Suno first launched its v6 models earlier this month, the company’s first model trained on licensed music, as Warner Music Group, BMG and Believe all partnered with the company for their content.

“We believe this is a blueprint for how AI and the music industry can strengthen one another and build entirely new product experiences for artists, fans, and the broader music community,” Suno CEO Mikey Shulman said at the time.