Sony Music v. Udio (round two), 30,117 recordings AI training suit

Background

On July 20, 2026, Sony Music Entertainment and nine affiliated labels, including Arista Records and LaFace, filed a new copyright infringement suit against AI music generator Udio in the Southern District of New York. It is Sony's second case against the company: Sony and the other majors first sued Udio in June 2024 in RIAA-coordinated litigation alleging mass infringement of copyrighted recordings used as AI training data.

The new suit exists because of a procedural loss. Discovery in the original case let Sony inspect Udio's training data and identify hundreds of thousands of its recordings via audio fingerprinting. Sony moved to add more than 30,000 of them to that case, but on June 29, 2026 Judge Alvin Hellerstein denied the request as too late in discovery, while noting that plaintiffs "have the right to seek to stop infringement of, and recover damages for, all copyrighted works" and that "there is no requirement that it be done in [that] lawsuit." Sony took the invitation and filed a fresh complaint asserting 30,117 recordings, which it calls "only a small portion" of the matches.

The complaint brings three claims: infringement of post-1972 recordings, infringement of pre-1972 recordings protected under the Music Modernization Act, and circumvention of technological measures under the DMCA, based on allegations that Udio obtained many recordings by stream-ripping them from YouTube with the tool YT-DLP. Sony seeks statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work, up to $2,500 per act of circumvention, and an injunction, pushing Udio's theoretical exposure from roughly $50 million to as much as $4.5 billion.

Why It Matters for Artists and Fans

Sony is the only major that has not settled with or licensed Udio; UMG, Warner, Merlin, Kobalt, Believe, and the National Music Publishers' Association have all struck deals. That makes this case one of the last live tests of whether training a music AI on unlicensed recordings is infringement or fair use, rather than a question quietly resolved in private settlements that convert alleged infringement into label revenue. As the complaint puts it, Udio's "belated embrace of licensing only underscores the unlawfulness" of copying the recordings without a license in the first place. Whatever the outcome, artists whose recordings were allegedly used are watching another multi-billion-dollar fight over their work in which they are not at the table, the same dynamic driving the AFM's suit against UMG and Warner over the earlier Suno and Udio settlements.