Two days after Suno launched v6 with partners Warner, BMG and Believe, the two majors filed a second lawsuit arguing the old infringement was simply laundered into the new model.
Suno’s plan for v6 was simple: start over clean. Train the new model on licensed music, bring in partners like Warner Music Group, BMG and Believe, and leave the copyright fights of the past behind. Universal Music Group and Sony Music aren’t buying it.
On Sept. 18, two days after Suno launched v6, the two majors filed a second copyright lawsuit against the AI music company in U.S. District Court in Massachusetts. Their 45-page complaint argues that the new model is anything but a fresh start. In the labels’ words, as quoted by Variety, v6 is the “fruit of the same poisoned tree.”
The heart of the case is what the labels call model laundering. Suno has acknowledged that v6 was trained partly on outputs from its earlier models and on how users interacted with them. UMG and Sony say those earlier models were built on unlicensed recordings in the first place, so training a new model on what they produced carries the infringement forward instead of erasing it. Think of it as rewriting a copied essay in your own handwriting: the handwriting is new, the essay isn’t.
The complaint adds a second line of attack, too. The labels claim Suno got around YouTube’s technological protections to obtain music, a separate legal theory that doesn’t depend on the training argument at all. And they put a number on the alleged damage: 60,202 Sony and UMG recordings infringed since Suno launched, which they describe as only a small portion of the total. At the U.S. statutory maximum of $150,000 per willfully infringed work, that adds up to roughly $9 billion, at least on paper.
Suno rejects all of it. The company told Engadget the claims are fundamentally flawed and said v6 was developed with licensed content from Warner Music Group, BMG and Believe.
This is the second front in a fight that began in June 2024, when all three majors sued Suno over its original models. That first case is still active, but the lineup has changed. Warner has since settled and partnered with Suno, and BMG and Believe have signed on as partners as well. UMG and Sony even use those deals against Suno: in the new complaint, they argue that the licensing agreements prove a real market exists for licensing their music.
For anyone making songs on Suno today, nothing changes yet. For the industry, the question is bigger: can an AI model ever be clean if it learned from one that wasn’t? Now a court in Massachusetts gets to decide.
Sources: Billboard · Variety · The Hollywood Reporter · Law Commentary
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