Sony Music and Universal Music Group initiated legal action against Suno, an AI music generation platform, alleging that its newly released v6 model continues to infringe on their copyrights. The labels contend that while v6 was marketed as a fresh start, it was actually trained on outputs from earlier Suno models that themselves relied on unlicensed music obtained from YouTube and other online sources.
In their complaint, Sony and UMG employed the term “model laundering” to describe what they characterize as an effort to obscure the origins of copyrighted material. According to the legal filing, training a new model on the outputs of an infringing model does not eliminate the underlying infringement but rather transfers the value derived from copied recordings through successive generations of models and ultimately into v6.
When announcing v6, Suno CEO Jack Brody stated the model was “trained from the ground up” with “a new set of data.” Company spokesperson Rachel Racusen subsequently clarified that training data included licensed content from partners, user interactions, and user-generated creations, though she did not specify whether this encompassed uploaded audio or outputs derived from uploaded audio.
Sony also alleged that Suno employed a technique called distillation to train v6, whereby the new model was designed to replicate the outputs of earlier “teacher” models that incorporated infringing material. The labels argue that any model built on retained unauthorized copies of their recordings inherently benefits from that infringement, regardless of whether it was directly trained on those recordings. Sony and UMG remain among the prominent music industry entities that have not reached licensing agreements with Suno.
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