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 dubbed v6 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.”

In a scathing new lawsuit filed Friday (Sept. 18), 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 fundamentally 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,” attorneys for 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.”

The lawsuit repeatedly quotes Suno CEO Mikey Shulman‘s own words, including in an interview with Billboard’s On The Record podcast in which he was asked what data was used to train the new model. It also cites Shulman’s infamous quip that most people don’t actually “enjoy” making music.

“The time, practice, and skill Mr. Shulman derides are exactly what copyright law exists to encourage and reward,” lawyers for the labels write. “Suno’s entire business is built on a contradiction: it dismisses the human labor of making music as friction to be engineered away, while depending entirely on the recordings that are the product of such labor to build its product in the first place.”

In a statement to Billboard, a Suno spokesperson said the new lawsuit’s claims “remain fundamentally flawed on both the facts and the law” and said the company’s service was not designed to let users “imitate someone else’s work.”

“v6 was trained on content licensed from our partners, interactions including creations and preference signals from our community, and the accumulated learnings from our team,” the Suno spokesperson said. “We are excited for a future where AI and the music industry continue to strengthen one another and build entirely new product experiences for artists, fans, and the broader music community.”

UMG, Sony and Warner teamed up to bring a similar copyright 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 earlier case, which remains pending.

Both lawsuits turn on the question of AI training — using millions of existing works to “train” models to create new ones. Authors, newspapers, visual artists, movie studios and record labels have all sued AI labs over the process, claiming it violates copyright law at an industrial scale. AI companies say instead that they’ve transformed all those works into something new that’s covered by copyright’s fair use exemption. That unresolved legal issue carries trillion-dollar stakes for both AI and creative industries.

In the new case, UMG and Sony reprise many of the earlier lawsuits allegations. Much of the purpose of filing the new lawsuit was to add the thousands of new songs to the accusations against Suno; a judge previously ruled more songs can be added to such disputes, but only in the form of separate lawsuits.

But the case also heavily focuses on Suno’s new model, dubbed v6 — arguing that it is hardly the legally-trained model it’s been touted as. Instead, UMG and Sony say it was still trained on outputs and “user interactions” from the earlier models, a practice sometimes called using “synthetic data”; Shulman specifically mentioned those “interactions” during his On The Record interview.

Such conduct does not fix the training problem, the labels say, but merely “launders” it: “v6 is not a fresh start,” the labels’ lawyers write. “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.”

UMG and Sony say that obviously means that Suno has not absolved itself by cutting deals with the music industry. But they also go a step further — arguing in the new case that the AI lab has actually “repudiated” its central legal defense by reaching such licensing agreements.

Suno and other AI companies have long argued that they are legally allowed to take millions of works to create their models under fair use, which allows for copyrighted works to be re-used for free in certain circumstances. And a key factor courts consider when deciding that issue is whether a new version will harm the market for the existing work.

Suno’s attorneys have argued that since nobody was paying for AI training data, no such market exists. But in Friday’s new complaint, as Billboard predicted last month, UMG and Sony say that crucial argument is now clearly gone in the wake of Suno’s partnership deals: “Suno cannot credibly deny the existence of a market in which it is now a repeat, paying participant,” the companies write.

And they say the harm to the music industry extends well beyond lost licensing revenue. Suno is “saturating the market,” the labels say, with AI-generated music that “directly competes with, cheapens, and ultimately drowns out” real human songs. With such conduct continuing, UMG and Sony say that Suno merely trying to play nice with the music after-the-fact is not enough.

“It propagates the destructive theory that copyrighted music is free for the taking whenever a new technology claims that seeking and obtaining permission is just too cumbersome,” attorneys for the two majors write. “Since the day it launched, Suno has flouted the rights of copyright owners in the
music industry as part of a mad dash to become the dominant AI music generation service.”

Read the full lawsuit against Suno here.