Suno pitched its latest model as a fresh start. Sony and Universal Music Group say it carries the same problem as before, just under a new version number.
The two labels have brought a new lawsuit against the AI music company. They argue that Suno’s v6 model still infringes their copyrights. In their account, v6 was trained on outputs from Suno’s earlier models, and those earlier models were trained on unlicensed music ripped from YouTube and other sources.
The labels call it model laundering
The complaint accuses Suno of “model laundering” and sets out the labels’ reasoning in plain terms:
“Training a ‘new’ model on the outputs of an infringing model does not eliminate the infringement; it launders it, passing the value of Plaintiffs’ expression from the copied recordings into the tainted models, from those models into their outputs, and from those outputs into v6 … V6 is not a fresh start; it is the fruit of the same poisoned tree.”
It’s a sharp legal theory. The labels argue that one round of retraining doesn’t clean up a copyright problem. Instead, the problem gets passed down to every new model built on the one before it.
Suno has said little about how v6 was trained
At v6’s launch, Suno’s Jack Brody described the model as “trained from the ground up, with a new set of data,” and said that data included “user data.” He gave no further detail.
Suno later confirmed that the data includes “creations” from users. Asked for comment, the company declined to say more.
The labels’ case rests on that gap. If “user data” means tracks people made with older Suno models, then under the labels’ reasoning v6 took on whatever those models had absorbed.
The second claim is distillation
Sony also accuses Suno of using distillation to train v6. The complaint says v6 was trained to reproduce the results of Suno’s earlier “teacher” models, which were built on infringing data.
The filing goes further, stating that “even a model not directly trained on Plaintiffs’ recordings is informed by, and benefits from, Suno’s retained unauthorized copies.”
Put simply, the labels’ position is this: unless Suno rebuilds from scratch, every model it releases will still depend on the same disputed data.
Two major labels still haven’t signed a deal
Sony and UMG matter here for one more reason. They are prominent holdouts that have not signed a licensing agreement with Suno.
That means Suno can’t end this dispute just by pointing to v6’s new training run. The labels have made clear that they don’t think a new version number resets anything. Until Suno either licenses their catalogs or discloses what its “user data” contains, any claim that v6 is clean comes down to Suno’s word against the labels’.