Major record labels Sony Music and Universal Music Group have filed a new copyright lawsuit against AI music generator Suno, claiming its latest model continues to rely on unauthorized copies of protected songs. The music companies argue that Suno's new v6 model infringes on their intellectual property by learning from previous AI models that were originally trained on unlicensed music taken from YouTube and other online sources.
In their legal complaint, Sony and Universal accuse Suno of "model laundering." The labels argue that training a new model on outputs created by an earlier infringing system does not clear the legal violations, calling v6 the "fruit of the same poisoned tree." Sony also claims that Suno used a process known as distillation, training v6 to copy the output patterns of older "teacher" models that were built using stolen music data.
Suno has defended its technology, stating that the v6 model was built from the ground up using a fresh dataset. Jack Brody, a representative for Suno, said the training dataset included community user data. Suno spokesperson Rachel Racusen added that the data included licensed content from partners, community interactions, and user creations, though she did not clarify whether those creations included uploaded copyrighted audio or outputs generated from previous models.
The lawsuit highlights growing friction between music publishers and artificial intelligence developers over fair training practices. Sony and Universal are notable holdouts who have refused to sign licensing agreements with Suno, maintaining that AI models cannot be considered clean unless developers truly rebuild their systems without using any retained unauthorized copies.