Sony and Universal Music sue Suno again, accusing “model laundering” of its new v6 AI music model
Sony and UMG claim Suno’s latest AI vocalist model still relies on copyrighted music ripped from YouTube, despite the company’s assertion it was built from scratch.
Lawsuit filed, parties and timing
On September 25, 2026, Sony Music Entertainment and Universal Music Group filed a fresh lawsuit against AI music startup Suno. The complaint alleges that Suno’s newly released v6 model continues to infringe on the labels’ copyrights.
Allegations and specifics from the complaint
The plaintiffs argue that v6 was trained on outputs generated by Suno’s earlier models, which themselves were built using unlicensed recordings harvested from YouTube and other platforms. Sony and UMG label this practice “model laundering,” writing that “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.”
Suno’s co‑founder Jack Brody told The Verge that v6 was “trained from the ground up, with a new set of data,” including “user data,” but declined to detail the sources. Suno later confirmed to Engadget that the training data set contains user‑generated “creations,” without further clarification.
Sony also alleges Suno employed a technique called distillation, using v6 to mimic the behavior of its earlier “teacher” models that were trained on infringing material. The complaint states that even a model not directly exposed to the copyrighted recordings “is informed by, and benefits from, Suno’s retained unauthorized copies.”
Both record companies note they never entered a licensing agreement with Suno, positioning themselves as holdouts in the ongoing dispute over AI‑generated music.
Industry backdrop
The lawsuit underscores a growing tension between major music publishers and AI developers that rely on large datasets of existing songs. Suno’s approach of re‑using outputs from prior models highlights the legal gray area surrounding “model laundering,” a term the plaintiffs are using to describe the reuse of infringing data in successive AI systems. The case adds to a series of recent actions by content owners seeking to protect their rights as generative‑AI tools become more capable of producing music that mimics copyrighted works.
