UMG & Sony Hit Suno With New Lawsuit After Label-Backed Model: ‘Fruit of the Same Poisoned Tree’

Suno says its new model is a way to "move forward together" with the music business, but UMG and Sony say it's still "trampling" the rights of human artists. Malte Mueller/Getty Images Trending on Billboard 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 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.” Related 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,” 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 quoted 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 cited 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,” 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.” UMG, Sony and Warner all brought a similar 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 how 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 covered by copyright’s fair use exemption. In the new case, UMG and Sony say that Suno’s new model, dubbed v6, is hardly the legally-trained model it’s been touted as. Instead, they 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 say. “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.” Beyond arguing that Suno has not absolved itself by cutting deals with the music industry, UMG and Sony’s new case claims that the AI lab has actually “repudiated” its central legal defense by doing so. Suno and other AI companies argue they are legally allowed to take millions of works to create their models under fair use. But a key factor courts consider when deciding that issue is whether a new version will harm the market for the existing work. Suno has long argued that since nobody was paying for AI training data, no such market exists. But in Friday’s new complaint, UMG and Sony say that argument is now clearly gone: “Suno cannot credibly deny the existence of a market in which it is now a repeat, paying participant,” the companies write. A spokesperson for Suno did not immediately return a request for comment on Friday. Daily newsletters straight to your inbox Sign Up More From Pro