Sony Targets Udio With 30K-Song Copyright Claim, Calls It 'Just a Fraction' of Infringement

Sony Music Entertainment has filed a sweeping new lawsuit in a New York federal court against Udio, one of the most prominent AI-powered music generators on the market, alleging copyright infringement across more than 30,000 of its songs. The list of allegedly affected works spans decades and genres, including Elvis Presley's 'Hound Dog,' Beyoncé's 'Say My Name,' and Harry Styles' 'As It Was.' What makes the lawsuit especially striking is Sony's explicit warning that these 30,000 titles represent only a fraction of the total number of works it believes Udio unlawfully ingested during the training of its AI model.

This is not the first time Sony has taken legal aim at Udio. Back in 2024, Sony teamed with Universal Music Group and Warner Records to file an earlier coordinated lawsuit targeting both Udio and its competitor Suno, which together represent two of the most capable AI music generation platforms available to consumers. That initial action was widely seen as an industry-wide opening salvo in what promises to be a prolonged legal reckoning over how AI companies build their training datasets using commercially released music.

The new lawsuit appears to be a direct product of discovery proceedings from that earlier case. Having gained access to Udio's internal training data through the legal process, Sony claims it was able to identify the specific copyrighted recordings that were fed into the system. The scale of what Sony found — more than 30,000 individual songs — reflects how deeply commercial music catalogs appear to be embedded in the infrastructure of AI music tools. Music Business Worldwide was among the first outlets to report on the full scope of the updated claim.

The implications of this case extend well beyond Sony's balance sheet. AI music generators like Udio work by learning patterns, styles, and structures from vast libraries of existing recordings, which raises fundamental questions about whether that process constitutes fair use or outright theft. Courts have yet to establish definitive legal precedent in this space, making the Sony-Udio case one of several high-profile suits that could shape the future of generative AI and intellectual property law for years to come.

For Udio, the mounting legal pressure adds to an already difficult operating environment for AI music startups, which must simultaneously manage the technical costs of running large generative models while now also facing potentially catastrophic financial liability. The case is being watched closely by artists, labels, AI developers, and legal scholars alike, as its outcome could determine whether companies building on copyrighted creative work need licenses before training — or whether they face the prospect of paying massive damages after the fact.