UMG & Sony Hit Suno With New Lawsuit After Label-Backed Model: ‘Fruit of the Same Poisoned Tree’

Universal Music Group and Sony Music have filed a new lawsuit against Suno, adding thousands of new songs to the legal battle and arguing the company’s new model is just “fruit of the same poisoned tree.”

The new case comes a week after Suno released a new AI model in “partnership” with several large music companies, including Warner Music Group, which it touted as a way for AI and the music business to “move forward together.”

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In a scathing complaint filed Friday (Sept. 18) in Boston federal court, the two largest players in that industry told Suno they had no interest in doing so. They added more than 61,000 new songs to the fight and argued Suno was still the same illegal product even after the release of its new model.

“Suno’s wholesale theft … threatens the entire music ecosystem and the numerous people it employs,” the two majors write. “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.”

UMG, Sony and Warner all brought a similar lawsuit against Suno in 2024. Warner reached a settlement in November to license its catalog to the company, but the other two majors have continued to litigate that case, which remains pending.

Both cases turn on the question of AI training — using millions of existing works to “train” models how to create new ones. Book authors, newspapers, visual artists, movie studios and record labels have all sued AI labs over the process, claiming it violated copyright law en masse through that process. AI companies say they’ve transformed all those works into something new that’s a form of legal fair use.

In the new case, UMG and Sony say that Suno’s new model, dubbed v6, is hardly the fully-legal model it’s been touted as. Instead, they say it was still trained on outputs and “user interactions” from the earlier models — a practice sometimes called using “synthetic data.” Such conduct does not fix the training problem, the labels say, but merely “launders it.”

“v6 is not a fresh start,” the labels say. “It is the fruit of the same poisoned tree. Suno’s development of v6 continued, rather than ended, its unauthorized exploitation of Plaintiffs’ Copyrighted Recordings.”

Beyond arguing that Suno has not absolved itself by cutting deals with the music industry, UMG and Sony’s new case claims that the AI lab has actually “repudiated” its central legal defense by doing so.

Suno and other AI companies argue they are legally allowed to take millions of works to create their models under copyright’s fair use exemption. But a key factor courts consider when deciding fair use is whether it will harm the market for the existing work. And Suno has long argued that since nobody was paying for AI training data, no such market exists.

In Friday’s new complaint, UMG and Sony say that argument is now clearly gone: “Suno cannot credibly deny the existence of a market in which it is now a repeat, paying participant,” the companies write.

A spokesperson for Suno did not immediately return a request for comment on Friday.