Sony and UMG's second Suno suit goes after the preference clicks behind v6

For the labels' first channel to reach v6, a court would have to hold that a user's choice between two generated songs is itself derived from the recordings that trained the model producing them. No court has ruled that model outputs, preference data or distilled technical knowledge carry copyright liability from one model generation to the next ^[7].

The second channel in the complaint is knowledge distillation, in which a new model learns behavior from an earlier model ^[5]. On the labels' reading, building v6 out of licensed recordings leaves it entangled with the older systems if those systems supplied outputs, rankings or learned capabilities during development ^[6].

The practical question for anyone running the same pipeline is how far deletion reaches. Training files can be listed and dropped. A preference record holds a prompt, two candidates and a choice; if the collection schema never stored which checkpoint served the candidates, the lineage cannot be reconstructed afterwards. Suno said it would retire its previous models ^[12]. The rankings those models generated stay where they are, and so do the weights of a student that learned from their behavior. Runtimewire's account says a ruling for the labels could make replacing a disputed training set far harder than deleting files and starting a new training run ^[8].

Suno's own description of the work gave the claim its shape. The company said v6 was trained using licensed content from its partners, creations and preference signals from users, and technical learnings accumulated by Suno's researchers ^[9]. Runtimewire wrote that this description supplies the labels with their new line of attack ^[11].

The licensing deals point the same direction. Sony, UMG and Warner first sued Suno in June 2024, and Suno argued that training on copyrighted recordings qualified as fair use ^[13]. Warner left that fight after reaching a licensing agreement with Suno in November 2025, BMG partnered in August 2026, and Believe followed on September 8th ^[14]. Sony and UMG now cite those deals as evidence that a functioning market exists for licensing recordings used in AI training ^[15]. The second complaint landed ten days after the Believe agreement ^[19].

Shulman's launch announcement described v6 as a foundation for opt-in artist products that would pay participating musicians ^[16]. The suit challenges whether that forward-looking licensing structure can be separated from how Suno developed the technology underneath it ^[17].