Suno has asked a federal court to reject a bid by Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment to add 61,026 recordings to their copyright infringement lawsuit against the AI music company.
The request follows a decision last week in which a New York judge denied Sony Music‘s attempt to add more than 30,000 recordings to the same labels’ parallel case against Suno‘s rival, Udio.
In a filing the same week in the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts, which you can read here, Suno pointed the court to a ruling in the parallel case that Sony is pursuing against its rival, Udio.
Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein, who is hearing the Udio case in the Southern District of New York, kept it at the 333 works originally in suit, rejecting Sony‘s move to add 30,442 sound recordings.
“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.”
Suno put that decision in front of Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV in Massachusetts, in a filing submitted by Britt Lovejoy, counsel for the company at Latham & Watkins.
“The court specifically observed that the addition of 30,000 works ‘would require substantial additional production and review’ of documents and ‘materially alter the scope of the case,’ creating a litigation that no ‘single judge could deal with,'” Lovejoy wrote.
“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.”
Britt Lovejoy, Latham & Watkins (counsel for Suno)
“Suno respectfully requests that this Court consider the Udio court’s denial of the plaintiffs’ motion to amend in deciding the present plaintiffs’ nearly identical motion,” the filing reads.
“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.”
The case began in June 2024, when the RIAA sued Suno and Udio on behalf of the three major music companies, accusing the platforms of “mass infringement” of copyright.
The original complaint against Suno asserted 560 works.
Warner Music Group, a former co-plaintiff, exited the case after settling with Suno in November 2025 and entering a licensing partnership.
That left UMG and Sony as the remaining plaintiffs.
The labels asked the court on May 21 to add the 61,026 recordings after using audio-fingerprinting service Audible Magic to identify their works inside Suno‘s training data.
UMG and Sony described that figure as “only a small fraction” of the matches their experts had found.
In its answer to the complaint, Suno had admitted that building its 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.”
The dispute has escalated even as Suno has raised more than USD $400 million this year at a $5.4 billion valuation.
Suno opposed the labels’ motion on June 4, arguing they had “unduly delayed” and were following the “standard playbook” of music rightsholders.
“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.
“After two years of extensive fact discovery, Suno is entitled to a timely consideration of its fair use defense,” the filing stated.
UMG and Sony rejected that reasoning as “meritless,” saying “the cause of any delay was Suno‘s ongoing refusal to provide Plaintiffs with the data in its possession.”
The size of the list carries weight because US copyright law caps statutory damages at $150,000 per work for willful infringement.
At that ceiling, the 61,026 recordings would carry a theoretical maximum of more than $9 billion in damages, up from around $84 million under the 560-work complaint.
Both cases turn on the same question: 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‘s use of books to train its AI models.
Fact discovery in the Suno case was scheduled to close on June 26, with the parties having discussed pushing the deadline into August.
Judge Saylor has yet to rule on the motion to add the 61,026 works.
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.Music Business Worldwide
