UMG and Sony file second copyright lawsuit against Suno over v6 'model laundering' claim

What happened

Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment filed a second copyright lawsuit against AI music company Suno on September 18, 2026, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. The 45-page complaint accuses Suno of copying 60,202 of the labels' sound recordings without a license and using them to build the models behind its music-generation service, which generates songs from text prompts.

The new filing's central allegation targets Suno's v6 model suite, launched September 9 in partnership with Warner Music Group, BMG and Believe. Suno's chief product officer said v6 was trained "entirely from scratch" without UMG or Sony recordings. The labels dispute this: they allege v6 was built on the outputs and user-preference data of earlier Suno models that were themselves trained on unlicensed recordings — describing v6 as "the fruit of the same poisoned tree" and calling the practice "model laundering." Suno rejected the claims as "fundamentally flawed on both the facts and the law."

The labels seek a declaration of infringement, statutory damages, attorneys' fees, and a court order stopping further use of their recordings, and demanded a jury trial. US copyright law allows up to $150,000 per work for willful infringement — a theoretical ceiling above $9 billion across the 60,202 recordings — plus up to $2,500 per act of circumventing YouTube's anti-downloading technology.

Why it matters to creators

This case tests whether an AI company can "clean" a model by training a new generation on the outputs of an earlier allegedly infringing model. The labels' "model laundering" theory, if it sticks, would close off a common compliance route and raise the cost of training music models — but also confirms that retroactive licensing deals (like Suno's Warner/BMG/Believe partnerships) do not settle liability for earlier training. The tension between litigate-then-license is the new playbook: Warner settled and licensed; UMG and Sony kept suing.

What is not yet known

No court has ruled on the "model laundering" theory; these are allegations in a complaint, not findings. The first suit (filed 2024) is still pending, and a judge in August 2026 blocked the labels from adding the additional recordings to it — the second filing followed from that ruling.