Suno's clean restart just collided with its $9 billion past

Artists can sue without naming one song

Suno asked a federal judge in Massachusetts to throw out an artists' class action because, across 66 pages, the amended complaint↗ attached no infringing output ¹. On 28 September, Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV refused: its 100 examples of Suno outputs that closely imitate existing songs made infringement plausible at the pleading stage, and proving specific outputs is, in his words, "a question for another day" ¹. The DMCA claim over the YouTube downloads survived; only a Tennessee consumer-protection claim died ¹.

The past already carries a $9 billion tag

The ruling landed ten days after Sony and Universal sued Suno a second time, in Boston, over 60,202 sound recordings↗ ². At up to $150,000 per infringed work, the labels put the theoretical maximum at just over $9 billion, with roughly $150 million more sought for circumventing YouTube's anti-downloading technology ². Suno's paper value rose from $500 million in 2024 to $2.45 billion last November ³ and to $5.4 billion in June, on a $400 million round led by Bond Capital ⁴. It still sits under the line. The settlements bought Suno the licensed future; the past is priced in a courtroom.

The clean restart trained on its own users

Suno launched v6 on 9 September with Warner, BMG and Believe as partners, chief product officer Jack Brody saying its models were trained "entirely from scratch, from the ground up" ². By 22 September the account had widened: v6 learned from "interactions including creations and preference signals" from its community, the first time user creations appeared in Suno's public training story ⁵. Its terms have claimed a "perpetual, irrevocable" license over user content since January 2024 ⁵. The users are on the ledger too: what they made is now inside the record a court may price.

The labels say training a new model on an infringing model's outputs "does not eliminate the infringement; it launders it," making v6 "the fruit of the same poisoned tree" ². A Munich court has already ruled for GEMA against Suno ⁶.

Fair use is the whole defense

Suno calls the claims "fundamentally flawed on both the facts and the law," and a 1 September filing↗ calls its training "quintessential fair use" while admitting it pulled YouTube audio with YT-DLP ⁵. Warner settled in November 2025 and licenses v6; Sony and Universal fight on ⁵. Universal is building the licensed flank anyway: an ElevenLabs platform where artists choose whether to take part, and a separate one with Udio ⁷.

Where the money sits

The June round also drew IVP and Union Square Ventures, with Lightspeed and Menlo from earlier ones; Suno counts two million subscribers and $300 million in annual recurring revenue ⁴. The listed exposure runs through Sony (SONY) and Universal (UMG.AS).

Saylor now holds the original labels' case, the second suit, assigned to him after he refused in August to fold 61,026 works into it, and the artists' class action ¹⁵. Dispositive motions are not due until spring 2027 ³. The next real event is whether a class that need not name a single infringing output can find them once discovery opens the training data, the discovery Saylor just made harder to shut down.