Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment filed a second Suno copyright lawsuit on Friday, adding 60,202 sound recordings to their case against the AI music company. The complaint, filed in the District of Massachusetts as case 1:26-cv-14275, lists twelve label entities led by UMG Recordings and Sony Music Entertainment. Warner Music Group is not among them.
The labels’ first case against Suno began in June 2024 and is still running. Rather than start a separate case immediately, they first tried to fold the new recordings into that existing one. A forensic analysis of Suno’s training data had turned up more than 61,000 additional works, and the labels moved to amend their original complaint to include them. Suno opposed the motion. On 18 August, the court denied it without prejudice, mainly because amending the complaint would disturb the case schedule.
Why the labels filed a second Suno copyright lawsuit
The court did not question the underlying claims. Labels are “of course entitled to pursue valid claims for copyright infringement,” it wrote, before pointing to a different path. Proceeding in “parallel cases” best balanced the labels’ interests with judicial economy, the court concluded. The new complaint says Universal and Sony are doing exactly what the court had in mind.
The filing leans heavily on Suno’s own admissions from the first case. The labels say Suno acknowledged training its models “by showing the program tens of millions of instances of different kinds of recordings,” and that those recordings “presumably included recordings whose rights are owned by the Plaintiffs in this case.” What Suno would not do, according to the labels, is identify which recordings. They say the forensic analysis they commissioned found millions of their works inside the training data.
Suno’s own licensing deals undercut its defense
Suno has spent the past year signing the kind of agreements the labels argue it should have pursued from the start. Warner Music Group signed a licensing deal in November 2025, which the complaint now refers to as a “former plaintiff.” BMG followed on 12 August, a company the labels note had “never sued Suno.” Believe signed on 8 September to supply training data, and nine days later Suno launched version 6 of its model, built on licensed catalogue.
The labels draw a direct line between those deals and their case. Three agreements signed in under a year, the complaint argues, “confirm that a functioning market exists for licensing sound recordings to train generative AI models.” Suno has pushed back on that framing. Chief product officer Jack Brody has said the revenue share involved is “not in exchange for training” and that the deals are “not really about the data.” The complaint counters with Suno co-founder and chief executive Mikey Shulman, quoted as saying the company “will be licensing works.” It calls the resulting arrangement “a functioning licensing market, whatever nomenclature Suno adopts for litigation purposes.”
Suno once blocked users from prompting it with the names of specific recording artists, and Shulman cited that restriction as evidence its models were built to generate “completely new outputs.” The complaint says the block is gone: users can now prompt with artist names through what it calls prompt augmentation. It also quotes an early investor who told Rolling Stone, “If we had deals with labels when this company got started, I probably wouldn’t have invested in it.” Suno, the investor said, “needed to make this product without the constraints.”
The complaint also points to Suno’s own terms of service. Since January 2024, every user has had to grant Suno a “worldwide, non-exclusive, fully paid-up, sublicensable” and “irrevocable” license over anything they upload, covering reproduction, storage and the creation of derivative works. The labels argue this shows Suno understood exactly what training on someone’s audio requires. Demanding a license from its own users while taking commercial recordings for free, the complaint says, makes the infringement “knowing and willful,” the standard that unlocks the higher damages tier.
What the complaint asks for
The complaint brings three counts. Two cover direct infringement, split between recordings made after 1972 and older recordings protected under the Music Modernization Act. The third alleges circumvention: the labels say Suno “stream ripped” audio from YouTube, using code to access, extract, copy and download files in violation of YouTube’s terms and of section 1201(a) of copyright law.
Universal and Sony are seeking up to $150,000 per work for willful infringement, plus up to $2,500 for each act of circumvention. Across 60,202 recordings, the statutory ceiling alone runs past $9 billion. The labels also want an injunction ordering Suno to stop circumventing YouTube’s protections and to stop the infringement, and they have requested a jury trial.
The numbers behind the labels’ argument
Fair use arguments often turn on market effect, and the complaint leans on data rather than description. Streaming service Deezer reported in July that AI-generated tracks passed half of all daily uploads for the first time, around 90,000 a day, up from about 39% six months earlier. Suno has told investors its users generate a catalogue the size of Spotify’s entire library every two weeks. The complaint also cites The Velvet Sundown, an AI act that reached more than a million monthly Spotify listeners in summer 2025 before its audience learned it was machine-made.
Shulman’s own public statements appear throughout the filing. The complaint quotes him saying “it is not really enjoyable to make music now” and that “increasingly taste is the only thing that matters in art and skill is going to matter a lot less.”
The complaint also details Suno’s finances. Its latest funding round raised more than $400 million at a $5.4 billion valuation, up from $2.45 billion in autumn 2025. The labels say Suno generates hundreds of millions of dollars a year in revenue and projects $1 billion by 2028. Its top subscription tier costs $24 a month. Former employees of Kensho Technologies founded Suno in July 2023, and the company, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was integrated into Microsoft Copilot that December.
A pattern across the AI music industry
Universal and Sony are not alone in filing a Suno copyright lawsuit twice against the same target. Sony sued Suno’s closest rival, Udio, a second time in July over an additional 30,000 songs. In Europe, a German court already ruled against Suno in a case brought by the collecting society GEMA, finding that the company broke copyright law.
Shulman said in January 2025 that it seemed “silly to throw a bunch of venture dollars at lawyers instead of sitting down and talking about how you could work together.” The labels note, in the new complaint, that he said this seven months after they first sued.