UMG / Sony v. Suno (round two), 60,202 recordings and the v6 'poisoned tree'

Background

Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment filed a second copyright suit against Suno on September 18, 2026 in the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts, docketed as 1:26-cv-14275. The 45-page complaint asserts 60,202 sound recordings, a figure the labels say they arrived at by running audio fingerprinting from Audible Magic against Suno's training data during discovery in their first case. At the $150,000 statutory ceiling for willful infringement, that carries a theoretical maximum of just over $9 billion; the labels also seek up to $2,500 for each act of circumventing YouTube's anti-downloading technology, which applied once per recording would add roughly $150 million. They ask for an injunction against any further use of their recordings and have demanded a jury trial.

The case exists because Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV said no. In the original June 2024 action, which covers 560 works, UMG and Sony asked to add 61,026 recordings; on August 18 Saylor refused, reasoning that the expansion would delay a case he wants decided on the fair use question, while noting the labels were free to bring the extra works as a separate suit. The new complaint explains the original number this way: "Because Suno concealed the contents of its training data, the complaint in the previous action identified a minuscule, illustrative fraction of the recordings Suno had actually copied." Even 60,202, it adds, "remain only a small portion" of the works infringed.

The complaint's central new theory targets v6, the model suite Suno launched on September 9 in partnership with Warner Music Group, BMG and Believe. Suno's position is that v6 is clean: Chief Product Officer Jack Brody said at launch that it "was trained entirely from scratch, from the ground up," on data that "doesn't include data from Universal or Sony." The labels argue that is beside the point, because v6 was trained on the outputs of and preference signals from earlier models, and by knowledge distillation from them — "a new 'student' model is trained to reproduce the learned behavior of a predecessor 'teacher' model." On that account, "the capabilities they transmit — how to compose, arrange, and render convincing imitations of human-created music across genres and styles — were derived from the unlicensed recordings on which those models trained." The filing names v4, v4.5, v4.5+, v4.5-all, v5, v5.5 and v6 as products of the same copied corpus, and notes Suno has never said it destroyed the copies.

The suit also turns Suno's licensing deals into evidence. Suno settled with Warner in November 2025, signed BMG on August 12, 2026 and announced Believe on September 8. "Three agreements with three major rightsholders in less than a year confirm that a functioning market exists for licensing sound recordings to train generative AI models," the complaint says, and that Suno "itself recognizes that using copyrighted sound recordings for this purpose requires permission." That matters because market harm is one of the four fair use factors. The labels call Brody's line that the deals are "not really about the data" self-serving, and point to Deezer's July 2026 figure that more than half of the roughly 90,000 tracks arriving on the platform daily are AI-generated: "Dilution at this scale and velocity is not just a future harm; it is a present, measured, and accelerating one."

Why It Matters for Artists and Fans

The laundering argument is the one to watch, because it is the first serious test of whether an AI company can wash out a training-data problem by building the next model on the last one. If synthetic outputs and preference data count as a clean-room reset, then the industry-standard fix for an infringement claim becomes one more round of training, and every catalog scraped before the music stopped is permanently monetizable. If they do not, the taint travels forward indefinitely, and a licensing deal signed after the fact does not cure models already shipped.

Note who is on which side of this one. Warner, BMG and Believe are partners on v6; Universal and Sony are plaintiffs against it. The same recordings, the same models, and the difference is whether a given rightsholder took the deal. For the performers on those recordings, neither branch pays out automatically — the AFM's separate suit against UMG and Warner exists precisely because session musicians say the AI licensing money did not reach them. And the market-harm argument the labels are making here, that machine-generated tracks compete for "a share of the fixed royalty pools from which genuine artists and rightsholders are paid," is the same argument independent artists have been making about the majors' own catalog dominance for years. It is more persuasive when a billion-dollar plaintiff says it.