UMG and Sony file second copyright suit against Suno over 60,000 recordings

What happened

On 18 September 2026, UMG Recordings (with Capitol and affiliates) and Sony Music Entertainment (with Arista, LaFace, Ultra, Volcano, Zomba and other affiliates) filed a second copyright infringement complaint against Suno, Inc. in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts (Case No. 1:26-cv-14275). The 45-page complaint asserts 60,202 additional sound recordings that forensic analysis allegedly found in Suno's training data — works the plaintiffs say were not covered by their original June 2024 action (No. 1:24-cv-11611).

The complaint alleges Suno obtained many recordings by "stream ripping" them from YouTube in circumvention of technological measures, and that Suno has admitted its models were built by showing the program "tens of millions of instances of different kinds of recordings." It further alleges that Suno now permits users to prompt its service with specific artist names through prompt augmentation. These are allegations in a complaint; no ruling has issued on them.

Why it may matter to you

If you are a recording artist or rights holder, this is the largest single AI-training copyright filing to date by number of works asserted (60,202), and it documents the labels' forensic methodology for identifying training-data contents. The stream-ripping allegation — copying via circumvention of YouTube's access controls — parallels the DMCA anti-circumvention claims appearing in several other 2026 cases.

What is not yet known

Whether the court will accept the forensic identification of works in the training set; whether Suno's fair-use defense survives; and how this parallel action interacts with the original 2024 case, in which the court denied leave to amend on scheduling grounds (18 August 2026) while stating the plaintiffs were "of course entitled to pursue valid claims."