Sony and Universal sue Suno over v6, alleging it still infringes

What the labels allege

Sony Music Entertainment and Universal Music Group, with imprints as fellow plaintiffs, filed the 45-page complaint in the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts. The suit comes more than two years after Sony, UMG and Warner sued Suno in June 2024 through the RIAA. The labels point to Suno's admission that its new v6 family trained upon the outputs of previous models. The complaint says: 'training a new model on the outputs of an infringing model does not eliminate the infringement; it launders it.' The labels said v6 was 'not a fresh start; it is the fruit of the same poisoned tree.'

The complaint puts the number of recordings the labels say Suno infringed since its debut at 60,202, a total they say 'remain only a small portion' of the works violated. The labels argue that because v6 is partly built on users' outputs derived from former models, it remains in violation. 'It is a product of those tainted models and of the unauthorized copies of Plaintiffs' recordings that Suno retains and continues to use,' the complaint says.

Suno rejected the claim. A spokesperson called the allegations 'fundamentally flawed on both the facts and the law' and said the platform pulls 'musical qualities' when a user inputs an artist's name 'not so that a user can imitate someone else's work, but so that people learn the language of music and make something of their own.' The spokesperson said Suno launched v6 in partnership with Warner Music Group, BMG and Believe, and that v6 was trained on content licensed from partners, interactions including creations and preference signals from the community, and accumulated learnings from its team.

The v6 dispute

Suno unveiled v6 on 9 September 2026, nine days before the suit. Jack Brody, Suno's chief product officer, told Rolling Stone the models were 'trained from the ground up on licensed data provided to us by our partners, user data, and then the accumulation of all the learnings that have gone into it.' He called it 'the first model developed in partnership directly with the industry.' Suno said past models trained on unlicensed data would no longer be supported. The labels counter that v6 partly uses users' outputs from those former models.

Suno has admitted scraping material from publicly available sources including YouTube and Deezer. Company executives have said its training metadata does not include artists' names, cannot replicate material it was trained on, and that Suno is trying to improve impersonation detection.

Licensing deals with Suno and Udio

Warner Music Group settled its suit and signed a licensing deal with Suno in November 2025, becoming the first major label to partner with the company. The deal lets users create songs with the voices, names and likenesses of Warner acts who opt in. Suno committed to new licensed models next year and to limit downloads to paid subscribers, who would pay more and face a cap. It also acquired the live-music platform Songkick as part of the agreement.

Universal Music Group settled with Udio in October 2025 and announced a joint licensed subscription service for 2026. UMG said the service would be trained on authorized and licensed music. Udio's existing product would remain available during a transition period, with creations held in a walled garden and fingerprinting and filtering added before launch. BMG and Believe have also signed deals with Suno that powered v6. Sony Music is still suing both Suno and Udio, while UMG is still suing Suno.

Suno raised $400 million in a Series D at a $5.4 billion valuation, more than double its previous round. It said it passed 2 million subscribers in February. Billboard reported the company claims 100 million people have created songs on the service.

What happens next

The labels have asked the court to declare that Suno infringed their works, award statutory damages and order Suno to pay their attorneys' fees.