AI music platform Suno, facing copyright claims on several fronts, has been promising licensed models since November 2025.
That month, it settled Warner Music Group’s copyright lawsuit and said it would launch “new, more advanced and licensed models” in 2026.
In the months since, Suno has signed deals with BMG and, just yesterday, Believe. It has also committed to audio watermarking and fingerprinting technology, and capped the number of songs its subscribers can download each month.
Today (September 9) sees the global launch of Suno‘s v6 suite of models, which the company says it developed with its “industry partners, including Warner Music Group, BMG, and Believe.”
Suno‘s previous models will be retired the same day, according to Chief Product Officer Jack Brody.
“v6 is designed to expand what is creatively possible and lay the foundation to launch new products that open up revenue opportunities across the music ecosystem,” wrote Suno co-founder and CEO Mikey Shulman in a blog post.
“We believe this is a blueprint for how AI and the music industry can strengthen one another and build entirely new product experiences for artists, fans, and the broader music community.”
Brody noted that the data used to train the new models “doesn’t include data from Universal [Music Group] or Sony [Music Entertainment].”
UMG and Sony Music remain plaintiffs in the RIAA-coordinated case filed in Boston in June 2024, where they allege copyright infringement in the training of Suno‘s past models.
The labels filed an amended complaint on August 25 adding a claim that Suno bypassed YouTube‘s anti-downloading technology.
Suno, in its answer filed on September 1, admitted that “audio data was obtained from YouTube for use as training data using YT-DLP,” but challenged whether the labels have standing to bring the claim, and accused them of “anticompetitive activities that extend an unlawful monopoly” over music. Fact discovery closes on September 30.
Elsewhere, globally, Suno lost a copyright case to GEMA at the Munich Regional Court on July 31.
Denmark’s Koda sued the company in Copenhagen in November 2025, and Canada’s SOCAN filed a claim in the Federal Court of Canada on September 2.
Round Hill Music sued Suno and data-scraping firm Bright Data on August 17, seeking damages the publisher says could approach or exceed USD $1 billion, and has said it does not intend to settle.
Singer-songwriter Jason Isbell and three other artists filed a proposed class action against Suno on September 1, alleging the company commercially exploited their names and likenesses without consent.
“v6 was trained entirely from scratch, from the ground up,” according to Suno‘s Jack Brody. “It’s trained on data that is different from the data that the previous models were trained on.”
He added: “It’s a combination of data that’s been licensed from these partners, user data, but most importantly, it is the accumulation of the team’s learnings from what users are looking for in these models, and other technical breakthroughs and R&D that have led to more capable and higher quality music models.”
“v6 was trained entirely from scratch, from the ground up.”
Jack Brody, Suno
“I think the wrong way to think about these partnerships is to think about them as acquiring the data to train our models,” Brody said. “It really is about establishing partnerships that allow us to build net new product experiences in partnership with the industry and the artists who have made it what it is.”
According to Suno, the user data referenced by Brody is preference data, not audio uploaded by users.
Two versions of a song are generated each time someone creates one on Suno, and the company says it uses “signals” about which version a user preferred to learn which elements of a song people are more likely to enjoy.
Suno’s terms of service grant the company a “perpetual, irrevocable” license over “any and all Content” – a category the document defines as covering both what users submit and the Output generated from it – for purposes including the “improvement” of “the artificial intelligence and machine learning models related to the Service.”
Elsewhere, the terms state that no further permissions are needed for Suno to use a user’s submissions “to train, develop, fine-tune or otherwise improve” those models.
“v6 is designed to expand what is creatively possible and lay the foundation to launch new products that open up revenue opportunities across the music ecosystem.”
Mikey Shulman, Suno
Brody added: “Obviously, getting to v6 and training this on a new set of data that, for example, doesn’t include data from Universal or Sony is part of getting our partners and the industry more comfortable with what we’re doing. But it’s really a small part of what this partnership is all about.”
Asked how v6, which Suno describes as its “best yet,” could be an improvement on its predecessors without Universal‘s and Sony‘s recordings, Brody said: “A lot of the things that make these models better are actually not the data it is trained on.”
He added: “It is the R&D, the breakthroughs and the technical innovations that go into how these models are architected, how they are shaped, how we tune them based on preferences, and all of that.”
On the licensed repertoire that was used, Brody said: “For the data that’s been licensed to train on, that’s managed by the rightsholders. So Warner has basically figured out which music to hand over as part of that process for training.”
Brody also told MBW that from launch day, “a portion of our revenue will be shared with our partners, and those rightsholders are responsible for figuring out how to distribute that capital.”
The v6 generation comprises three models, according to Shulman‘s blog post.
Suno calls v6 its flagship model for Pro and Premier subscribers, and says it “consistently delivers polished music across every genre and style.”
v6-wild, also available to Pro and Premier subscribers, is “built for exploration,” according to the company, and is “less predictable and more varied.”
v6-mini is available to everyone, and Suno claims it “delivers better, faster results than any free model on any music creation platform.”
You can read about the new models’ capabilities here.
Music from participating Believe and TuneCore artists and labels will be included in the new models, the two companies said on September 8.
BMG‘s music has begun being added to the model, Suno told MBW.
Brody said the launch is the first of two phases.
Shulman wrote: “What comes next is a new kind of product we’re developing: opt-in experiences built around individual artists, where artists can choose to participate and get paid when they do, and fans get new ways to connect with the artists they love.”
Asked whether Suno‘s licensing partners have any claim on user tracks, Brody said anything generated out of Suno “is considered an original creation.”
Brody added that “if you’re a paying subscriber, you own the music that you generate on the platform.”
“As we start to introduce derivative experiences with artists who opt in, some of the ownership rights and some of the nuances around that will differ, because it’s no longer original music creation,” said Brody.
Suno‘s terms of service, in effect since September 3, state that the company “hereby assigns” to Pro and Premier subscribers its rights in any output it owns and they generate, subject to the platform’s commercial-use restrictions. The same document adds that “Suno makes no representation or warranty to you that any copyright will vest in any Output.”
“Applicable rights holders may also have the right to collect revenue related to distribution of Outputs on third party platforms,” the Suno terms state.
Asked whether more rightsholder deals would follow, Brody said: “That is absolutely our goal.”
Rival Udio has signed licensing deals with Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, Merlin, and Kobalt since settling UMG‘s lawsuit in October 2025.
Udio‘s platform follows the “walled garden” model championed by UMG, under which AI-generated music cannot be downloaded or distributed beyond the platform.
Suno has resisted that model, and its Chief Music Officer Paul Sinclair argued in February for “open studios, not walled gardens.”
Spotify is building a fan-made covers and remixes tool of its own, to be sold as a Premium add-on. It struck the first deal for that tool with UMG in May, and extended it through Merlin on August 4.
Shulman wrote that v6 is “more than a new version of Suno – it’s a new way for technology and the music industry to move forward together, with human creativity at the center.”Music Business Worldwide