Record labels sue Suno and Udio
Suno later conceded training on copyrighted recordings but argued the use was transformative fair use, comparable to a person learning to write by reading.
- Courts & copyright
- Notable
Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group, acting through the RIAA, filed copyright infringement lawsuits against the two leading AI music-generation startups: Suno, sued in the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts, and Udio’s parent company, Uncharted Labs, sued in the Southern District of New York. Both complaints alleged mass, unauthorised copying of copyrighted sound recordings to train the companies’ models, and sought declarations of infringement, injunctions against further use of the labels’ recordings, and statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work — a figure that, applied across a catalogue of the scale major labels hold, implied potential exposure in the billions of dollars.
Suno and Udio did not dispute, in their subsequent public statements and later court filings, that they had trained on copyrighted recordings; instead they argued the use was protected by fair use, framing model training as a transformative, intermediate process — comparable, in Suno’s characterisation, to a person learning to write by reading widely — that did not reproduce or distribute the underlying recordings themselves. Udio separately argued that musical genres and styles could not be owned, and that its system identified patterns across recordings to generate new compositions rather than copying specific works.
The cases were among the first major label suits against AI-music generators and set up a fair-use fight parallel to the one already under way over text and image models. Rather than proceeding to trial, both disputes were substantially resolved through settlement roughly sixteen months later: Universal Music Group settled with Udio in October 2025, and Warner Music settled with Suno the following month, in both cases pairing the settlement with a licensing deal and a commitment to retire the unlicensed models in favour of ones trained on authorised catalogues — while some claims, including Sony’s against both companies, remained unresolved.