Why Sony Just Filed a New AI Music Copyright Lawsuit Against Udio

Sony has initiated a new lawsuit against Udio, doubling down on its aggressive copyright campaign against the AI music company months after the other majors buried the hatchet.

The lawsuit, filed on Monday (July 20) and obtained by Billboard, expands the scope of Sony’s existing legal claims against Udio. The major music company initially teamed up with Universal Music Group (UMG) and Warner Music Group (WMG) in 2024 to sue both Udio and rival AI music company Suno, alleging both companies had committed copyright infringement at an “almost unimaginable scale” by training their models on unlicensed recordings.

UMG and WMG both exited the Udio litigation in the fall after reaching licensing deals that will require the tech company to build a new model out of pre-cleared training data and keep all AI-generated music inside a “walled garden” on the platform. WMG later settled with Suno as well. UMG and Sony are both continuing to sue Suno, but Sony is the sole remaining holdout of the three majors to still be pursuing Udio in court.

Sony is showing no signs of giving up that fight against Udio. Monday’s new lawsuit increases the number of sound recordings at issue in the case from 333 to more than 30,000, which in turn balloons Udio’s potential damages exposure from $50 million to a whopping $4.5 billion.

According to Sony, the smaller subset of songs in the original lawsuit was merely a “minuscule, illustrative fraction of the recordings Udio had actually copied.” Sony says it wasn’t until it began the legal discovery process and got access to Udio’s training data that it learned just how many Sony-owned recordings had been allegedly ripped from YouTube and fed into the AI model.

Procedurally speaking, Sony had no choice but to bring a new lawsuit if it wanted to increase the amount of music in the case. Sony previously tried to add these new recordings to the original lawsuit, but Udio argued that expanding the dataset two years into the process would amount to “indefinitely derailing the litigation.”

A federal judge agreed with Udio last month and refused to let Sony amend the first lawsuit, writing that doing so “would substantially prejudice defendants and unduly delay the resolution of this action.” He acknowledged, however, that a second lawsuit was a possibility: “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,” wrote Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein.

Udio has maintained that its training process was fair use, a tenet of copyright law that allows unlicensed works to be used for transformative purposes. Whether AI training does indeed qualify as fair use is an untested legal question currently at the center of dozens of pending copyright lawsuits around the country.

Sony addresses the fair use debate directly in Monday’s new lawsuit, specifically the “market harm” factor, in which a judge must consider whether alleged infringement has harmed an existing licensing market. Sony says the fact that Udio has inked training licenses with UMG and WMG, as well as with Kobalt, Merlin, Believe and the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA), shows that such a market does indeed exist.

“A company that pays to license the very inputs at issue cannot credibly maintain that no market exists for those inputs, or that any such market is too speculative to be cognizable,” writes Sony in the new complaint.

Sony also notes in Monday’s lawsuit that it is not outright against the emerging tech, writing “there is room for AI and human creators to forge a sustainable, complementary relationship” as long as that relationship is based on the “well-established mechanism of free-market licensing that ensures proper respect for copyright owners.” Sony has AI partnerships in place with Spotify and Klay.

Udio did not immediately return a request for comment on Monday. A Sony rep declined to comment beyond the court filings.