Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment (Sony) want to update a lawsuit against the AI music-generation platform Suno.
As AFROTECH™ previously reported, major record labels UMG and Sony, as well as Warner Music Group, accused Suno of “massive and ongoing infringement” in a lawsuit that states it “copied sound recordings from the labels ‘en masse and ingested them into its AI model.”
Music Business Worldwide reported that the original complaint listed 560 copyrighted works in a June 2024 filing. As it relates to Suno’s actions, the lawsuit claimed that if there was no copyright violation, “Suno’s service would not be able to reproduce the convincing imitations of such a vast range of human musical expression at the quality that Suno touts,” according to Forbes.
Suno CEO Mikey Shulman said in a statement at the time that the company “prize(s) originality” and said its technology is “designed to generate completely new outputs, not to memorize and regurgitate pre-existing content,” per the outlet.
Warner Music Group ended up settling with Suno in November 2025 and signed a licensing deal with the company, per Music Business Worldwide.
In the latest update, since Suno has reportedly refused to provide details on the material it used to train its AI model, UMG and Sony used audio fingerprinting technology to search for their recordings in Suno’s training data, according to the outlet. To add their findings to the original complaint, the two record labels filed a motion on May 21, 2026, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts.
“To identify a sampling of their copied sound recordings for inclusion in an initial Complaint, Plaintiffs engaged in a highly manual and burdensome process. In short, they used ‘targeted prompts’ in Suno’s service that included the characteristics of popular sound recordings,” the motion read. “If those targeted prompts caused Suno’s service to generate outputs that closely resembled those particular sound recordings, then Plaintiffs understood that Suno had copied those sound recordings for inclusion in its training data.”
The motion said that Suno acknowledged that “the tens of millions of recordings that Suno’s model was trained on presumably included recordings whose rights are owned by the Plaintiffs in this case.”
Yet it claims that Suno still refused to identify the sound recordings it used.
UMG and Sony are seeking to update the copyright infringement lawsuit to include 61,026 recordings they have identified, per the motion.
It would need to be approved by Judge Dennis Saylor IV, who is presiding over the case, notes Music Business Worldwide.
