The filing
Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment filed a second lawsuit against Suno on Friday in federal court in Boston, covering 60,202 sound recordings, Music Business Worldwide reported.
The target is v6, the model Suno launched on 9 September and describes as trained on licensed music. The labels do not dispute that the licences exist. They dispute that licensing the training data of the newest model cleans up what the model inherited.
The argument
The complaint’s central claim is about lineage rather than datasets. “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,” the filing says.
The mechanisms it names are knowledge distillation and user preference data — a newer model learning from an older model’s outputs, and from the choices users made between those outputs. On that reading, “every model Suno has ever released — from its earliest versions through v6 — is the product of, and continues to exploit” the original unauthorised copying.
Why there are now two cases
This is a second suit rather than an expansion of the first because a judge said it had to be. In August, Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV refused to let the labels add 61,026 recordings to their original June 2024 case, on the grounds that the extra works would delay a case he wants decided on fair use. He noted they could be brought separately. They now have been.
That procedural history matters for anyone reading the docket. The original case is still the one that will produce a fair use ruling. This one is about scale, and about whether a clean-data claim survives contact with a model’s own history.
What is at stake financially
US copyright law allows statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work for wilful infringement. At that ceiling, 60,202 recordings would carry a theoretical maximum above $9bn. The complaint also seeks penalties over the alleged circumvention of YouTube’s protections, which MBW puts at roughly $150m.
Ceilings are not awards, and statutory maximums are rarely what a court lands on. The number matters mainly as leverage in a market where some of Suno’s counterparties have already chosen to settle rather than litigate: Warner Music, BMG and Believe have each signed licensing deals with Suno, and those deals helped supply v6.
What to watch
The interesting question is not whether v6’s licences are real. It is whether a court accepts that a model can be contaminated by its ancestors — that distillation carries legal status along with capability. If it does, every lab that has bootstrapped a newer model from an older one’s outputs inherits the same exposure, in music and well beyond it.
Suno has not publicly responded to the new complaint. Watch for its answer, and for whether the two Boston cases are consolidated.
