The Labels Sue Suno Again: 60,202 Recordings, Nine Days After v6 Launched
Universal Music Group and Sony Music have filed a new lawsuit against the AI music company Suno, nine days after the company launched its first model built on licensed music. The accusation is legally novel: the labels claim that v6 is not a clean model, but the result of "laundering" — that the value of copied recordings has been carried forward through earlier, allegedly unlawful models and their outputs. The case will test whether a licensing deal on the outside can cover training data on the inside.
What Is New
The lawsuit was filed on September 18, 2026, in the federal district court in Massachusetts in Boston — the same court where the labels' original lawsuit against Suno from June 2024 is still ongoing. According to secondary coverage of the complaint (case 1:26-cv-14275, 45 pages), it targets v6 specifically, the model Suno launched on September 9, 2026, as its first built with licensed content from Warner Music Group, BMG, and Believe.
The labels are seeking an injunction and statutory damages, according to a secondary review of the complaint (note.com). No court hearings have yet been scheduled, according to Boston.com, which reported that Suno's representatives did not respond to inquiries.
The core of the complaint is the number 60,202: the count of recordings UMG and Sony claim Suno has infringed since the company's debut. At the same time, the labels stress that this "only constitutes a small portion" of the total number of infringed works, according to Variety.
The "Laundering" Theory
The allegations rest on a chain: Suno's earlier models, the labels say, were trained on unlicensed music, including tracks ripped from YouTube and other sources (The Verge). v6, the labels argue, was not trained from scratch on clean data — it was trained on the outputs of those models and on user interactions with them.
According to the quote from the complaint, which Sony and UMG shared with The Verge:
"Training a 'new' model on the outputs of an infringing model does not eliminate the infringement; it launders it, passing the value of plaintiffs' expression from the copied recordings into the tainted models, from those models into their outputs, and from those outputs into v6 … v6 is not a fresh start; it is the fruit of the same poisoned tree."
Sony additionally claims that Suno used distillation: that v6 was trained to replicate the results of earlier "teacher models" built on infringing data. This is the labels' claim, not a verified description of Suno's training process — but the theory is new in practice: it shifts the focus from what data a model was trained on, to what data the model's predecessors were trained on.
Three Legal Pillars
According to the secondary review of the complaint, the case rests on three main claims:
- Direct infringement of recordings from 1972 onward, which enjoy full copyright protection.
- Direct infringement of pre-1972 recordings, which under American law are protected under a separate, older legal framework.
- Violation of Section 1201 of copyright law — the claim that Suno circumvented YouTube's technical protection measures through stream ripping.
The third point is worth noting: it targets the collection of data, not the model itself, giving the labels a separate avenue regardless of how v6 was actually built.
Why a Second Lawsuit
The path to this lawsuit runs through a denial. In the June 2024 case, the labels sought to add more than 61,000 songs to the scope of the litigation. On August 18 of this year, the judge rejected this, citing that it would "impact the current case schedule," according to the secondary review. According to the complaint's rendering, the judge also wrote that "the scope of the infringement is not a defense," and that it was appropriate to proceed with a separate lawsuit (note.com).
That means Suno now faces two parallel cases in the same court: the original from 2024, covering the historical training period, and the new one, constructed around v6 and the "laundering" theory. The details of the August 18 ruling are, however, known only through the complaint's own characterization and secondary coverage — the ruling itself has not been made public in the available material.
Suno's Response — and What It Doesn't Say
Suno has rejected the claims. A spokesperson called them "fundamentally flawed both as a matter of fact and law" and told Variety that the platform retrieves "musical qualities" when a user enters an artist's name — "not so a user can imitate others' works, but so people learn music's language and create something of their own" (Variety).
More telling is spokesperson Rachel Racusen's description of the training data to The Verge: "v6 was trained on content licensed from our partners, interactions including creations and preference signals from our community, and the accumulated learning from our team."
This is the first time Suno has confirmed that v6 was trained in part on users' own "creations" — that is, music made with earlier models (Music Business Worldwide). That confirmation effectively supports part of the labels' premise: v6 builds on outputs from earlier models. The point in dispute is whether those outputs carry the original infringement with them.
Oddly, the statement says nothing about uploaded audio files. The Verge noted that Racusen did not specify whether the training data included uploaded audio tracks — or outputs based on such uploads. That is an open question with potential weight, since uploads may contain users' own copies of protected music.
An Industry Reckoning on Two Tracks
The case also reveals how divided the music industry is. Warner Music Group — which joined the 2024 lawsuit — is not part of this one. Warner settled with Suno and signed a licensing agreement, and v6 launched as built in partnership with Warner, BMG, and Believe (Boston.com). Meanwhile, competitor Udio has signed licensing agreements with none other than Universal and Warner. The companies say artists who participate can opt in and get paid — but the terms of the payouts and the number of participating artists have not been disclosed (Yahoo Entertainment).
The result is paradoxical: Universal licenses to Udio and sues Suno. Warner licenses to both and sues no one. The two tracks — litigation and licensing — run in parallel within the same industry, against companies doing fairly similar things.
What Remains to Be Answered
Several central questions remain open. No court dates have been set, and it is unclear how the new case will be coordinated with the ongoing 2024 case. It is unknown whether v6's training data included uploaded audio files. And the "laundering" theory itself is unproven: it assumes that infringement in training data propagates through model outputs and onward into a new model — a causal chain the labels must prove, not merely assert.
In the meantime, both sides have done their part to make this stage clear: the labels have put forward a theory testing whether licensing agreements can paper over historical infringement, and Suno has confirmed enough that the dispute is about the interpretation — not the existence — of the company's training data.