Universal Music and Sony sue AI platform Suno in second copyright lawsuit

Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment have filed a second copyright infringement lawsuit against the AI music platform Suno in a Boston federal court. The new complaint alleges that Suno’s recently released v6 model was trained using unauthorized recordings, specifically through “knowledge distillation” and model-transfer techniques from previous versions. The labels claim the new model inherits value from copyrighted works used to train its predecessor “teacher” models.

The lawsuit asserts that Suno’s v6 model is built upon “users’ interactions” with prior models, which the plaintiffs argue are themselves derived from mass copyright infringement. This legal action follows a previous case filed in June 2024; while Warner Music Group was involved in the initial suit, it has since settled and partnered with Suno.

In a separate legal action, Universal Music Group has also sued the music distributor DistroKid. UMG alleges that DistroKid engaged in deceptive trade practices and copyright infringement by flooding platforms with AI-generated content.