Universal Music Group and Sony Music sued Suno again today in Boston federal court. This time they assert 60,202 specific sound recordings, compared with the 560 works in their original 2024 case, and they aim squarely at the V6 models Suno launched Sept. 9.

The new case exists because of a procedural no the labels experienced last month. On Aug. 18, Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV refused to add more than 61,000 works to the first lawsuit, saying he wants that case decided on fair use without delay, and he noted the labels could sue separately.

So they did. The works came from discovery, where the labels ran Suno's training data through Audible Magic fingerprinting and say they matched millions of their recordings.

The biggest new argument is about the brand-new V6. Despite Suno's assurances that the current V6 models are fully licensed in collaboration with Warner Music Group, BMG, and Believe, the plaintiff labels say the damage from the original scraping is ongoing.

Every time Suno generates two songs and a user picks one, Suno records that choice. The complaint says Suno used those choices to help train V6. The labels' argument is simple: the songs users were choosing between came from older Suno models built on their music, so anything V6 learned from those choices still traces back to their recordings.

They also allege Suno used knowledge distillation to pass its older models' learned behavior into V6.

"V6 is not a fresh start, the complaint reads, "it is the fruit of the same poisoned tree. Suno’s development of v6 continued, rather than ended, its unauthorized exploitation of Plaintiffs’ Copyrighted Recordings."

Suno's position is the opposite: CPO Jack Brody told Music Business Worldwide at launch that V6 was trained from scratch on data containing nothing from Universal or Sony.

That's where this case stops being only about Suno.

"Fruit of the poisonous tree" comes from criminal law, where evidence derived from an illegal search gets thrown out. Borrowing that metaphor for copyright and AI development is a big step. The labels aren't just saying Suno needed a license to train anymore. They're saying their rights follow their work all the way down the chain, into model weights, preference data, and every successor model those things touched. In practice, that's a scorched-earth theory: if it holds, no amount of retraining can clean the slate, and Suno's only exits are a license on the labels' terms or a massive judgment.

If a court accepts it, a clean license for a new model wouldn't be enough. Any lineage back to unlicensed training could keep the liability alive, and that would matter to almost every AI music company that iterated its way to where it is now.

The rest of the complaint leans on familiar material. It cites 404 Media's July report on leaked Suno code logging more than 2 million scraped YouTube Music clips, and it adds an anti-circumvention claim over stream ripping. Suno admitted in a Sept. 1 filing that it used YT-DLP to obtain YouTube audio.

Then there's the irony. When we covered V6's launch into a worsening legal storm, the open question was whether the Warner and BMG deals were a hedge. The labels now use those deals, plus Suno's Sept. 8 Believe partnership, as their best evidence: three paid agreements in under a year prove a training-license market exists, which undercuts fair use.

The ceiling is striking. Statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work put 60,202 recordings at just over $9 billion, above Suno's $5.4 billion valuation. Nobody expects a maximum award, but it's a number built for the negotiating table.

Fact discovery in the first case closes Sept. 30.