The RIAA lawsuits against Suno and Udio are two federal copyright cases filed on June 24, 2024, by the Recording Industry Association of America on behalf of the three major record label groups, accusing the AI music generators of copying vast quantities of copyrighted sound recordings to train their systems.1 The Suno case was filed in the District of Massachusetts (Case No. 1:24-cv-11611); the Udio case, against operator Uncharted Labs, Inc., was filed in the Southern District of New York (Case No. 24-cv-04777). Since then, Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group have settled their claims through licensing deals with one or both defendants, while Sony Music’s case against Udio and the remaining plaintiffs’ case against Suno are heading toward summary judgment on the central question: whether training a music-generating AI on copyrighted recordings is fair use.
What the Labels Alleged
The complaints named plaintiffs from the Universal, Sony, and Warner families, including UMG Recordings, Capitol Records, Sony Music Entertainment, Atlantic Recording Corporation, Rhino Entertainment, Warner Records Inc., and others. The Udio complaint added Arista Music, Arista Records, Warner Music Inc., Warner Records LLC, and Warner Records/SIRE Ventures.
Both suits share the same core theory. The labels alleged that Suno and Udio scraped and ingested “decades worth of the world’s most popular sound recordings” to build generative models whose outputs would then compete with, and substitute for, the originals. The Suno complaint pointed to subscription tiers reaching $24 per month for commercial use of AI outputs. The Udio complaint alleged the platform produced roughly ten music files per second, over six million per week, with a top tier at $30 per month.
To show that copyrighted material sat inside the training data, the labels described their own testing. In the Suno case, prompts referencing specific artists and eras allegedly produced outputs that mimicked Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” and Bill Haley & His Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock,” both owned by UMG. In the Udio case, the labels said targeted prompts got the model to imitate The Temptations’ “My Girl,” yielding outputs titled “Sunshine Melody,” “Tempting Melody,” and “My Tempting Girl” that shared melody, chords, and vocal style with the original.
The complaints also accused the defendants of being “deliberately evasive” about their training data, calling it “competitively sensitive” and “trade secrets” while publicly claiming they used only “publicly available” music. The labels sought declarations of infringement, permanent injunctions, and statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work. Suno’s original complaint listed 560 specific copyrighted works as a non-exhaustive sample; the labels have since moved to expand that number dramatically.
The DMCA Stream-Ripping Claim
As the cases developed, the labels added a second legal theory. Amended complaints alleged that Suno and Udio bypassed YouTube’s “rolling cipher” encryption to “stream-rip” recordings for training, violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s anti-circumvention provisions at 17 U.S.C. § 1201(a).
Udio moved to dismiss this claim, arguing the rolling cipher is a “copy control” rather than an “access control” and therefore falls outside § 1201(a). On April 15, 2026, Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein denied that motion, ruling that the complaint “plausibly alleges that YouTube employs technological measures that regulate access to its content and that Defendant circumvented them.” The judge said the factual record was too thin at the pleading stage to classify the cipher definitively and allowed Udio to renew the argument after discovery.
How Suno and Udio Have Responded
Both companies filed their answers on August 1, 2024, and both built their defenses around fair use. Suno CEO Mikey Shulman compared the training process to “a kid learning to write new rock songs by listening religiously to rock music,” arguing that “learning is not infringing.” Udio said its technology is “designed to generate new musical ideas, not reproduce copyrighted works” and that it had implemented filters to keep the model from mimicking protected content.
Beyond fair use, both companies pleaded copyright misuse and unclean hands, alleging that the major labels engaged in anticompetitive conduct to maintain an “unlawful monopoly over the production and commercialization of music.” If a misuse defense succeeds, it temporarily prevents enforcement of the copyrights at issue.
On fair use specifically, the defendants emphasized that the plaintiffs did not allege any particular AI-generated output was itself infringing, only that the training process involved unauthorized copying. The defendants called this concession “fatal to Plaintiffs’ claims,” arguing that intermediate copying to build a non-infringing product is permissible under the Second Circuit’s ruling in Authors Guild v. Google and the Supreme Court’s decision in Google v. Oracle.
Which Claims Have Settled
Starting in late 2025, large parts of the litigation moved out of court through licensing partnerships.
- On October 29, 2025, Universal Music Group announced a compensatory settlement and licensing agreement with Udio covering both recorded music and publishing catalogs, tied to a new subscription service planned for 2026.
- On November 19, 2025, Warner Music Group settled with Udio under an agreement allowing WMG artists to opt in to Udio’s new subscription platform.
- On November 25, 2025, Warner Music Group and Suno announced what they called a “first-of-its-kind” partnership. Suno agreed to transition to new, licensed AI models in 2026 and deprecate its current unlicensed models. WMG artists and songwriters were given “full control over whether and how their names, images, likenesses, voices, and compositions are used in new AI-generated music” through an opt-in mechanism. As part of the broader deal, Suno acquired the concert-discovery platform Songkick from Warner Music Group.
The settlements changed both platforms’ economics. Suno announced that free-tier users would lose the ability to download songs, and paid-tier users would face monthly download caps. Udio continued operating its existing service while adding fingerprinting and filtering features and building its new licensed platform.
On the publishing side, the National Music Publishers’ Association announced on June 10, 2026, what it called the “first ever industry-wide licensing deal with a major AI music company,” an agreement with Udio that split AI licensing income 50/50 between songs and sound recordings. NMPA CEO David Israelite said this departed from streaming-era norms, where recordings typically earned more than three times what compositions received.
What Is Still Being Litigated
Sony Music v. Udio
After UMG and WMG settled and stipulated to voluntary dismissal, Sony Music Entertainment remains the sole major-label plaintiff against Udio. The case continues before Judge Hellerstein in the Southern District of New York. In May 2026, Sony moved to add 30,442 copyrighted recordings to the complaint, which Udio has indicated it will oppose. Document production was scheduled to close on June 26, 2026, and both sides are reportedly moving toward summary judgment briefing focused on fair use.
A significant discovery ruling landed on June 3, 2026, when Judge Hellerstein vacated a prior order that had sealed data about the size of Udio’s training dataset, opening the door to potential public disclosure of that figure.
UMG and Sony v. Suno
With Warner Music Group dismissed as a plaintiff following its settlement, the Suno case continues before Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV in the District of Massachusetts. It is widely regarded as the bellwether for whether training a generative music model constitutes fair use.
Between November 2025 and January 2026, the plaintiffs used Audible Magic audio fingerprinting technology to analyze Suno’s training data. On May 21, 2026, they moved to add 61,026 copyrighted sound recordings to the lawsuit, up from the original 560. Suno opposed the motion on June 4, 2026, arguing that it came at “the tail end of fact discovery” and would effectively restart the case, delaying resolution of the central fair use question. Suno’s chief technology officer stated in filings that the size of the company’s training corpus is “not publicly available” and asked the court to keep the figure sealed, warning that competitors could benchmark their own systems against it.
Fact discovery was scheduled to close on June 26, 2026, with a modest extension to August 15, 2026, to accommodate depositions. A fair-use-focused summary judgment ruling is not expected before the second half of 2026 at the earliest.
Why Fair Use Is the Hard Question
Every remaining claim comes down to 17 U.S.C. § 107, which weighs four factors: the purpose and character of the use (including whether it is “transformative”), the nature of the copyrighted work, the amount used, and the effect on the market for the original.
Two 2025 rulings in text-based AI cases gave mixed signals. In Bartz v. Anthropic and Kadrey v. Meta Platforms, federal courts found that training large language models on copyrighted works was “exceedingly transformative” and therefore fair use. The Kadrey court, however, cautioned that the analysis could differ when AI outputs “compete with the originals and thereby indirectly substitute for them,” a warning that points directly at music generators whose purpose is to produce songs.
Legal commentators have said the music cases face a harder path than text-based AI disputes because Suno and Udio train models specifically to generate the same type of creative work they ingested, which cuts against the “transformative” argument under the first factor. Under the fourth factor, judges in related cases have been skeptical of claims about hypothetical licensing markets that had not materialized. The growing number of actual licensing deals between labels and AI companies may now serve as evidence that a real market exists.
Related Cases Sometimes Confused With These
The RIAA suits are the major-label cases, but several parallel actions target the same defendants and are sometimes conflated with them. Country artist Tony Justice and his label, 5th Wheel Records, filed class-action suits against Suno and Udio in June 2025; Suno’s motion to dismiss remained under advisement after a March 20, 2026 hearing before Judge Saylor. In October 2025, a group of Chicago-area artists led by David Woulard filed class actions in Illinois federal court against both companies, adding claims under the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act and the Illinois Right of Publicity Act for unauthorized use of voiceprints and identities. Udio moved to dismiss the Illinois case in February 2026 on personal jurisdiction grounds, and that motion remained pending as of mid-2026. Attorney Krystle Delgado is separately coordinating litigation on behalf of nearly 1,300 independent musicians, producers, and songwriters against both companies.
Outside the United States, Germany’s GEMA sued Suno in January 2025 before the Munich Regional Court, citing works by Alphaville, Kristina Bach, Lou Bega, Frank Farian, and Modern Talking. Oral proceedings were held on March 9, 2026, with a decision expected on June 12, 2026. Denmark’s Koda has filed a separate lawsuit alleging unauthorized use of Danish music. These are distinct proceedings, not part of the RIAA cases, though they turn on similar underlying facts.