Suno Urges Court To Block UMG And Sony’s Bid to Add 61,000 Songs To AI Copyright Lawsuit

AI music company Suno has urged a US federal court to reject a request by Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment to add more than 61,000 sound recordings to their ongoing copyright infringement lawsuit, arguing that the move would significantly delay a ruling on a key legal question surrounding AI training and fair use.

In a filing submitted to the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts on June 4, Suno claimed that the record labels had waited too long to seek such a major expansion of the case. The company argued that allowing the addition of 61,026 recordings would require extensive new discovery and postpone judicial consideration of whether using copyrighted music to train generative AI systems constitutes fair use.

The lawsuit, originally filed in June 2024 by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) on behalf of the three major music companies, initially centered on 560 copyrighted works. UMG and Sony moved in May to dramatically increase that number after reportedly identifying thousands of their recordings in Suno’s training dataset using audio fingerprinting technology from Audible Magic.

Suno criticized the move as a familiar tactic employed by large rights holders, accusing the labels of beginning litigation with a limited number of “representative” works before attempting to broaden the scope of the case after years of discovery.

The company maintained that, after nearly two years of fact-finding, it deserves a timely ruling on its fair use defense. Suno pointed to recent court decisions involving AI developers Anthropic and Meta, where judges found that training generative AI models could qualify as transformative use under copyright law.

According to Suno, if the labels wish to pursue claims involving additional recordings, they should file a separate lawsuit rather than substantially rewriting the existing case.

UMG and Sony have strongly disputed that argument. In their own filing, the labels said any delays in identifying the additional recordings were caused by Suno’s reluctance to provide relevant training data during discovery. They described Suno’s objections as lacking merit and argued that the expanded claims are directly related to the ongoing litigation.

The parties are also locked in a separate dispute over transparency surrounding Suno’s training data. The labels have asked the court to reject Suno’s attempt to keep confidential the total number of audio files used to train its AI model.

Suno has argued that revealing the figure could harm its competitive position. However, UMG and Sony countered that the company has already publicly acknowledged training its system on tens of millions of recordings, including works likely owned by the plaintiffs. Given those admissions, the labels argued that disclosing a more precise figure would not reveal any commercially sensitive information.

The case has evolved since it was first filed. In November 2025, Warner Music Group settled its claims against Suno and entered into a licensing partnership with the AI company, leaving Sony and UMG as the remaining plaintiffs.

The latest legal filings come shortly after Suno raised more than $400 million in fresh funding, valuing the company at approximately $5.4 billion. Fact discovery in the case is currently scheduled to conclude on June 26, although both sides have discussed extending the deadline into August.

Meanwhile, Suno’s competitor, Udio, is facing a similar legal battle. Sony Music has sought to add more than 30,000 recordings to its copyright lawsuit against the AI music platform after gaining access to Udio’s training data. The case is being heard in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Earlier this month, Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein lifted a sealing order covering portions of the proceedings, potentially exposing more details about Sony’s allegations that Udio copied and ingested thousands of copyrighted recordings while developing its AI models.

As both lawsuits move toward key discovery deadlines, they are increasingly viewed as landmark cases that could help define how copyright law applies to the training of generative AI music systems.