“The magnitude of the alleged infringement is not a defense,” the court told Suno in August.
Universal and Sony have now sued the AI music company a second time. They filed the complaint in the District of Massachusetts on Friday, as case 1:26-cv-14275.
It asserts 60,202 sound recordings. The first case, filed in June 2024, is still running.
The filing names twelve label entities, led by UMG Recordings and Sony Music Entertainment. Warner is not among them.
The judge effectively told them to file it
The labels first tried to fold the new recordings into the existing case. They moved to amend the original complaint to add more than 61,000 further works.
A forensic analysis of Suno’s training data had turned those up.
Suno opposed that motion. On 18 August the court denied it without prejudice, mainly because amending would disturb the case schedule.
The court did not question the claims themselves. The labels are “of course entitled to pursue valid claims for copyright infringement”, it wrote.
It then pointed at the exit. Proceeding in “parallel cases” best balanced the labels’ interests with judicial economy, the court concluded.
The new complaint says the labels are doing exactly what the court contemplated.
What the labels say Suno already conceded
The complaint leans on Suno’s own answer in the first case. The labels say Suno acknowledged building its models “by showing the program tens of millions of instances of different kinds of recordings”.
Those recordings “presumably included recordings whose rights are owned by the Plaintiffs in this case”, Suno said, according to the filing.
What Suno would not do, the labels say, is name them. They commissioned the forensic analysis for that reason, and say it found millions of their works in the training corpus.
Suno has not yet responded to the new complaint, which reached the docket on Friday.
Three licensing deals are the labels’ sharpest weapon
Suno has spent the past year signing the very agreements the labels say it should have sought first. The complaint lists three.
Warner Music Group signed in November 2025, and the complaint calls it a “former plaintiff”. BMG followed on 12 August, from a company the labels note had “never sued Suno”.
Believe signed on 8 September to supply training data. Nine days later Suno launched v6 on licensed catalogue.
The labels draw the obvious inference. Three agreements in under a year “confirm that a functioning market exists for licensing sound recordings to train generative AI models”, the complaint says.
Suno has tried to frame the deals differently. Chief product officer Jack Brody has said the revenue share is “not in exchange for training” and that the deals are “not really about the data”.
The complaint quotes Mikey Shulman, Suno’s co-founder and chief executive, saying the company “will be licensing works”. It calls the deals “a functioning licensing market, whatever nomenclature Suno adopts for litigation purposes”.
Suno’s own terms ask for what it did not give
The filing turns Suno’s contract with its users against it. Since January 2024 its terms of service have required every user to grant Suno a “worldwide, non-exclusive, fully paid-up, sublicensable” and “irrevocable” licence over anything they upload.
That licence covers reproducing, storing, modifying and creating derivative works from user content. The labels say it shows Suno knew perfectly well that training on someone’s audio needs permission.
Demanding a licence upstream while taking commercial recordings for free, the complaint argues, makes the infringement “knowing and willful”. Willfulness is what unlocks the higher damages tier.
The artist-name switch
Suno once blocked users from prompting it with the names of specific recording artists. Shulman cited that policy as proof the models were built to generate “completely new outputs”.
The complaint says the block is gone. “This design feature turned out to be so fundamental that Suno simply switched it off,” it reads, and users can now prompt with artist names through prompt augmentation.
The complaint also quotes an early investor. “If we had deals with labels when this company got started, I probably wouldn’t have invested in it,” the investor told Rolling Stone.
Suno, the investor said, “needed to make this product without the constraints”.
What it could cost
There are three counts. Two are direct infringement, split between post-1972 recordings and pre-1972 ones protected under the Music Modernization Act.
The third is circumvention. The labels say Suno “stream ripped” audio from YouTube, employing code to access, extract, copy and download files in breach of YouTube’s own terms and of section 1201(a).
The labels ask for up to $150,000 per work for willful infringement, plus up to $2,500 for each act of circumvention. Across 60,202 recordings the statutory ceiling alone runs past $9bn.
They also want an injunction requiring Suno to stop circumventing YouTube’s measures and to stop infringing, and they have demanded a jury.
The flood is the market-harm argument
Fair use turns partly on market effect, and the labels have reached for numbers rather than adjectives.
Deezer reported in July that AI tracks passed half of all daily uploads for the first time, roughly 90,000 a day, up from about 39% six months earlier.
Suno has told investors its users generate a Spotify catalogue’s worth of output every two weeks. The complaint also cites The Velvet Sundown, an AI act that reached over a million monthly Spotify listeners in summer 2025 before listeners learned it was machine-made.
Shulman’s own words do a lot of work in the filing. The complaint quotes him saying it is “not really enjoyable to make music now” and that “increasingly taste is the only thing that matters in art and skill is going to matter a lot less”.
Suno is worth more than when it was first sued
The complaint sets out the company’s finances in detail. Its latest round raised more than $400m at a $5.4bn valuation, against $2.45bn in autumn 2025.
The labels say Suno makes hundreds of millions a year and projects $1bn in revenue by 2028. Its top subscription tier costs $24 a month.
People who had worked together at Kensho Technologies founded Suno in July 2023. The company works out of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Microsoft integrated it into Copilot that December.
It is not the only front
Sony ran the same play against Suno’s closest rival in July, suing Udio a second time over 30,000 more songs.
Europe has already produced a ruling. A German court found Suno broke copyright in a case brought by the collecting society GEMA.
Shulman said in January 2025 that it seemed “silly to throw a bunch of venture dollars at lawyers instead of sitting down and talking about how you could work together”. The labels note he said it seven months after they sued.
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