Sony, Universal Sue Suno Over Alleged Copyrighted Training Data in v6 Model

Sony Music and Universal Music Group have filed a lawsuit against AI music platform Suno in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, alleging that the company's v6 model was trained on unauthorized content despite its recent licensing deals with other record labels.

The two labels claim that while Suno trained v6 partly on authorized material, it also relied on outputs from earlier models, which were allegedly trained on unlicensed data. In their complaint, they argued that using outputs from an infringing model to train a new one does not eliminate the infringement, describing v6 as "the fruit of the same poisoned tree."

Suno rejected the allegations, with a spokesperson saying the claims are "fundamentally flawed on both the facts and the law." The company defended its training approach, stating that its v6 model was trained on content licensed from partners, community interactions and preference signals, and accumulated learnings from its team. It also said that when users request a particular artist, the system translates the request into musical qualities rather than enabling imitation of another artist's work.

The lawsuit follows a hack earlier this year that exposed material apparently used to train Suno's previous models, including millions of music clips from YouTube Music and substantial content from other platforms. The case remains pending in court.