Sony Sues Udio Again over 30,000 Songs, Seeks $4.5 Billion
Sony has sued the AI music generator Udio for a second time, now over more than 30,000 of its recordings. The damages could reach $4.5 billion. And Sony’s cleverest move is to turn its rivals’ peace deals into a weapon.
Background
July 21, 2026 – 4:10 pm
Image by: Udio
The other two major labels made peace with Udio months ago. Sony did the opposite. On Monday, it filed a fresh lawsuit in New York, as reported by Billboard, covering 30,117 recordings.
Turning Peace into a Weapon
The heart of the case is fair use, the defense Udio leans on to justify training on unlicensed songs. Courts weigh whether that use harms a market for the original work, and Sony has found a sharp answer.
Udio has since signed training licenses with Universal, Warner, Kobalt, Merlin, Believe, and a US publishers’ group. That, Sony argues, proves a licensing market plainly exists. "A company that pays to license the very inputs at issue cannot credibly maintain that no market exists for those inputs," the complaint reads.
In other words, the truce that looked like AI’s peace with the music business has become the labels’ weapon against the one holdout.
Why Sue Twice?
The second suit is a workaround. Sony first tried to add the 30,000 songs to its original 2024 case. Last month, Judge Alvin Hellerstein refused, saying it would delay the trial, but noted Sony could file separately. So it did.
The Legal Battle
The complaint runs to three counts: copying modern recordings, copying older pre-1972 ones, and stripping YouTube’s protections to rip audio in breach of anti-circumvention law. Udio has admitted pulling from YouTube, as its rival Suno did, while calling it fair use.
Sony wants the statutory maximum, $150,000 a track, and a jury. The list of songs reads like a hall of fame: Elvis, Beyoncé, Bob Dylan, Britney Spears, and Michael Jackson, as The Verge detailed.
The Last Holdout
Sony is careful to sound pro-licensing rather than anti-AI, pointing to its own deals with Spotify and the startup Klay. Its message is a demand: pay for the inputs.
The stakes run past music. Fair use for AI training is still untested, the pivotal question in dozens of copyright suits, from book publishers to film studios. The closest case, Anthropic’s book-piracy settlement, dodged it, and a parallel fight against Suno is even larger.
Whatever the Manhattan court decides about Sony’s market-harm theory will not stay in music. It feeds straight into how every AI company is expected to pay for the data it trains on.
Story by Ana Maria Constantin