Suno has asked a federal court to block Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment from adding more than 61,000 recordings to their copyright infringement lawsuit against the AI music company.
The AI music company is leaning on a ruling in Sony Music’s parallel case against Udio: on June 29, a New York judge refused to let Sony add 30,442 sound recordings there, keeping that case at the 333 works still in the suit.
Days later, Suno put that decision before the Massachusetts court hearing its own case, urging it to reach the same result.
The number in the Suno case carries weight because US copyright law caps statutory damages at USD $150,000 per work for willful infringement. At that ceiling, the 61,026 recordings would carry a theoretical maximum above $9 billion, up from around $84 million under the original 560-work complaint.
The outcome could also shape the fight the wider industry is watching in the cases against Suno and Udio: whether training an AI model on copyrighted recordings without a license is fair use.
THE Udio Ruling Suno is citing
In the Udio case, brought by the labels in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein denied Sony‘s attempt to add 30,442 recordings, keeping the case at the 333 works still in the suit.
“Adding more than 30,000 works near the close of document discovery would require substantial additional production and review, generate further disputes, and materially alter the scope of the case before me,” Hellerstein wrote.
“I recognize that Plaintiffs have the right to seek to stop infringement of, and recover damages for, all copyrighted works. But there is no requirement that it be done in this lawsuit.”
On July 2, Suno put that decision in front of Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV in Massachusetts, in a filing submitted by Britt Lovejoy, its counsel at Latham & Watkins.
“For the same reasons that the Udio court denied the motion in that case, as well as the additional bases identified in Suno‘s briefing, this Court should deny Plaintiffs‘ motion here as well,” Lovejoy wrote.
How the case got here
The suit was filed in June 2024 by the RIAA, on behalf of all three major music companies, accusing Suno and Udio of “mass infringement” of copyright.
The original complaint against Suno asserted 560 works.
That changed after the labels used audio-fingerprinting service Audible Magic to identify their recordings inside Suno’s training data, then asked the court on May 21 to add 61,026 recordings.
UMG and Sony described that figure as “only a small fraction” of the matches their experts had found.
Suno had already conceded the scale of its copying, admitting in its answer that building the service “required showing the program tens of millions of instances of different kinds of recordings,” which “presumably included recordings whose rights are owned by the Plaintiffs.”
Warner Music Group, a former co-plaintiff, had already settled with Suno in November 2025 and entered a licensing partnership with the AI company.
That left UMG and Sony as the remaining plaintiffs.
Why Suno is fighting the expansion
Suno opposed the labels’ motion to expand the lawsuit on June 4.
“This is a too-familiar page from the standard playbook of aggregate music rightsholders: file an action asserting ‘representative’ works, let the litigation proceed through discovery for years, then attempt to expand the list of works exponentially at the close of fact discovery,” Suno‘s lawyers wrote.
Suno argued that adding tens of thousands of works would trigger fresh discovery and push back a ruling on its fair use defense.
“After two years of extensive fact discovery, Suno is entitled to a timely consideration of its fair use defense,” the filing stated.
In their motion to add the additional recordings to the case, UMG and Sony had pre-empted Suno’s objections as “meritless,” arguing “the cause of any delay was Suno‘s ongoing refusal to provide Plaintiffs with the data in its possession.”
The size of the list sits at the center of that fight, because each added work multiplies Suno‘s potential exposure under the $150,000 statutory cap.
The bigger question
Both cases turn on the same issue: whether training an AI model on copyrighted recordings without a license is fair use, a defense Suno and Udio have pressed since 2024.
In opposing the labels, Suno pointed to two rulings that found AI training to be transformative: Bartz v. Anthropic, in which a California judge held that Anthropic‘s use of books to train AI was fair use, and Kadrey v. Meta Platforms, which reached a similar conclusion for Meta.
Those were books cases, and MBW has previously noted that their reasoning may not map neatly onto music.
The California judge in the Anthropic case, William Alsup, called that use “spectacularly” transformative, on the basis that Claude‘s output did not resemble the source books.
The labels’ argument against Suno and Udio is different: that their outputs compete with the recordings used to train them.
The question reaches beyond the courtroom, because Warner and, in the Udio case, UMG have already begun settling it through licensing.
Warner‘s partnership with Suno, plus the Udio deals struck by UMG and WMG in late 2025, point to one possible future: licensed AI music, with labels and artists paid.
A ruling on fair use in the Suno case would reshape the leverage on both sides of those negotiations.
What happens next
Judge Saylor has yet to rule on the motion to add the 61,026 works.
Fact discovery and depositions now close September 30, 2026; dispositive motions due April 9, 2027,
Both sides are expected to move for summary judgment on the fair use question, in what is widely seen as a ruling that could set a precedent for Suno, Udio, and other AI music companies.
The dispute has escalated even as Suno has raised more than $400 million this year at a $5.4 billion valuation.
And the US litigation is not the company’s only front: Suno also faces copyright claims in Europe from Germany’s GEMA and Denmark’s Koda.
Reservoir (Nasdaq: RSVR) is a publicly traded, global independent music company with operations across music publishing, recorded music, and artist management. Music Business Worldwide
