Suno launches v6 models trained on licensed music

Suno launches v6 models trained on licensed music

The launch fulfills the promise made in the 2025 Warner Music settlement: the old, unlicensed models have been switched off, while Universal and Sony continue to sue the company.

Suno on Wednesday, September 9, 2026 launched its new v6 series of AI music models globally — trained, according to the company itself, on licensed music from Warner Music Group, BMG and Believe. The same day, the company's earlier models, which had been trained without licensing, were retired. The launch is the first concrete product of Suno's shift from lawsuits to licensing agreements — but Universal Music Group and Sony Music remain the opposing parties in an ongoing lawsuit.

What is being launched

The v6 series consists of three models: v6, v6 Wild and v6 Mini. According to Suno, these are the company's fastest models with the highest audio quality so far (Billboard).

Per Suno's press release, as reported by Gizmodo, users can ask the model to edit parts of an existing song, create mashups of multiple songs, or generate songs from videos, photos, journal entries or vague descriptions.

Suno calls this its first model release "in partnership with the music industry." Product lead Jack Brody tells Rolling Stone that v6 was "trained from the ground up on licensed data supplied by our partners, user data, and everything we've learned along the way" (Rolling Stone via MSN). These quality and training claims thus come from the company itself and have not been independently verified.

The licensing chain behind the launch

V6 builds on a series of agreements over the past year:

• Warner Music Group: A settlement with Suno in November 2025, where the promise of licensed models in 2026 was first made (Billboard). The company has not disclosed how many songs WMG contributed, or whether WMG's artists have chosen to participate; a WMG spokesperson did not respond to Rolling Stone's inquiry.
• BMG: A partnership and preemptive settlement announced August 12, covering both recordings and the publishing side. According to the joint press release, BMG's artists and songwriters must opt in to future use, and will then be paid (Rolling Stone).
• Believe: An agreement announced September 8, one day before the launch, with the distribution platform TuneCore. Music from participating Believe and TuneCore artists can train the new models, and compensation will, according to a source cited by Billboard, consist of a revenue share (Billboard).

According to Brody, the training data does not include music from the two remaining majors: "[It] doesn't include data from Universal [Music Group] or Sony [Music Entertainment]" (Music Business Worldwide).

Users notice the difference

The old models have been switched off, but users retain access to the songs they created with them, and can continue working on them in v6 (Rolling Stone). Since September 3, Suno has also sharply restricted music downloads — both measures were first promised in the WMG agreement in 2025.

The lawsuits continue

The launch lands while two of the major companies are still suing Suno. In its September 1 response to the court, the company admitted that "audio data was retrieved from YouTube as training data using YT-DLP," but disputed whether the record labels have the right to sue, accusing them of "anti-competitive activities that extend an illegal monopoly" over music (Music Business Worldwide). This is litigation context — the courts have not ruled on the matter, and fact discovery in the UMG/Sony case closes September 30, according to MBW's reporting.

Promised, but not launched

Suno has also announced future products for AI remixing, sampling and other derivative works using music from participating partners. Suno's own words in the announcement: "a new type of product" with "opt-in experiences built around individual artists, where artists can choose to participate and get paid when they do" (Complete Music Update). Brody tells Rolling Stone that the next phase of the WMG partnership will let users remix existing songs, but only from artists who have said yes. These products are thus announced — not launched.

What we don't know

Several key questions remain unanswered. The financial terms are not finally settled; according to Brody, as his Bloomberg interview is reported in Gizmodo, Suno pays the record labels and publishers for the copyright to the music it trains on, while the companies themselves will decide how royalties are distributed between artists and songwriters. Worth noting: in other interviews (with Rolling Stone and MBW), Brody has downplayed calling the partnerships "licensing of training data," which is not consistent with the account in the Bloomberg interview.

Suno has around 100 million users, according to the company itself at its funding round in November 2025. In June 2026, the company raised $400 million at a valuation of $5.4 billion (Rolling Stone).

With v6, Suno has thus replaced the models that underpinned the lawsuits — but without the two largest companies on board, and without the financial terms being made public.