Sony Music hits Udio with second 30,000-song AI copyright suit

Sony Music isn't letting Udio off the hook.

Sony Music Entertainment and nine affiliated labels filed a fresh copyright lawsuit against AI music startup Udio in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The claim lists 30,117 specific sound recordings allegedly used without permission to train Udio's music models, featuring works from Beyoncé, Michael Jackson, Elvis Presley, Harry Styles, Mariah Carey, and Alicia Keys.

Sony is seeking the statutory maximum of up to $150,000 per infringed work, alongside an injunction to stop Udio from continuing to use its catalog.

Caught red-handed in the training data

This is round two. Back in June 2024, Sony teamed up with Universal Music Group (UMG) and Warner Music Group (WMG) to sue both Udio and Suno.

During the discovery process of that original case, Sony gained access to Udio’s underlying source code and training sets. Forensic analysis uncovered that the startup allegedly used hundreds of thousands of Sony-owned recordings, with the 30,117 tracks representing just what investigators have cataloged so far.

Sony originally attempted to fold these newly identified tracks into the 2024 lawsuit. But after U.S. District Court Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein denied that motion on June 29, Sony simply repackaged the evidence into an entirely new standalone suit.

The complaint also reveals an uncomfortable operational detail: Udio allegedly used the command-line tool YT-DLP to stream-rip tracks directly from YouTube, bypassing technical protections to harvest source audio.

The lone holdout

The most fascinating dynamic here is the boardroom split. While Sony, Universal, and Warner initially presented a united front, Universal and Warner have since settled with Udio, securing licensing pacts that let artists opt in and helping Udio prep an industry-sanctioned model for later this year.

Udio has consistently stood by a fair-use defense, previously arguing its models listen to music much like human students studying scores to make transformative, non-infringing new music.

Sony turned Udio's recent corporate victories back on it. In the complaint, Sony argued that Udio's licensing deals with Universal and Warner prove Udio knows full well that commercial AI requires rightsholder permissions, directly undermining its fair-use stance.

Why it matters

For AI developers, the days of relying on fair use as a blanket liability shield are evaporating.

Once litigation hits the discovery phase, scraping methods, pipelines, and local cache logs become public record. Sony's allegation that Udio used scraping tools like YT-DLP to pull content off YouTube makes it far harder to paint data collection as passive internet browsing. To a court, that looks deliberate.

This also highlights a divergent split in how traditional media deals with generative AI. While competitors like Warner and Universal chose equity and licensing frameworks to steer the technology, Sony seems determined to push the legal boundary to a definitive ruling or a much higher settlement payout.

We think Sony's aggressive stance puts immense pressure on standalone AI startups. If statutory damages threaten multi-billion dollar liabilities across thousands of indexed tracks, running uncurated training runs on copyrighted media is quickly becoming an existential liability that no venture check can cover.