What exactly did Universal and Sony ask the court to do?
On May 21, 2026, Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment filed a motion in the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts, before Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV, seeking leave to file a second amended complaint. The ask is blunt: take the copyright case against Suno from the 560 works named in the original June 2024 complaint and bolt on 61,026 sound recordings.
That original complaint also included Warner Music Group. What changed is what the labels say they now have in hand. They claim discovery shows Suno trained on millions of their copyrighted recordings, and that the 61,026 figure is, in their words, only a small fraction of what they found.
How did they pin down 61,026 specific recordings?
This is the part that should make every rights holder pay attention. The labels used audio-fingerprinting technology from Audible Magic, run as a two-stage process. Stage one created digital fingerprints of Suno's training-data files, work that took roughly two weeks inside a secure room. Stage two matched those fingerprints against Audible Magic's content-recognition database.
"Denying leave to amend on that ground would effectively reward Suno for copying copyrighted works on an unprecedented scale and then hiding that copying from public view."
That line from the filing tells you the temperature. The majors are framing this as concealment, not a technicality.
How big could the damages actually get?
Statutory damages for willful copyright infringement run up to $150,000 per work. Do the arithmetic across 61,026 tracks and the numbers stop looking like a lawsuit and start looking like an extinction event. Complete Music Update reports total potential damages could top $9 billion if all 61,026 tracks are added.
For context on the company in the crosshairs, Suno had previously raised over $400 million at a $5.4 billion valuation. A $9 billion exposure dwarfs that.
Why is Suno fighting the expansion so hard?
Suno opposes the amendment. The company argues that adding tens of thousands of works at this stage would effectively start the case over and deny it a timely ruling on its fair-use defense, the legal argument the whole AI-music fight ultimately turns on. With Universal having separately settled its dispute with rival Udio, Suno is now the main contested battleground for whether training generative models on commercial masters is infringement or fair use.
