Sony Sues Udio Over More Than 30,000 Songs in Major AI Music Copyright Case

Key points

• Sony Music Entertainment filed a new copyright lawsuit against Udio, an AI music generator, in a New York court on Monday, July 21, 2026.
• The new filing names more than 30,000 songs, including tracks by Elvis Presley, Beyoncé, Britney Spears and Harry Styles.
• Sony is asking the court to block Udio from further copying its catalogue and seeking up to $150,000 per song infringed.
• A judge had earlier rejected Sony's attempt to add these songs to its original 2024 lawsuit, which covered only 333 works.
• Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group have since settled with Udio and are now working with the company as partners.

Sony Music Entertainment has filed a sweeping new copyright lawsuit against Udio, an AI music generator, a tool that lets users type a text prompt and receive a fully produced song in seconds. The suit, filed in a New York federal court on Monday, claims Udio copied more than 30,000 Sony-owned recordings without permission and fed them into its AI system.

The song list reads like a greatest-hits playlist. Elvis Presley's "Hound Dog," Beyoncé's "Say My Name," and Harry Styles' "As It Was" all appear, alongside tracks from Britney Spears and Johnny Cash. Sony says this list covers "only a small portion" of the works Udio allegedly infringed.

This is not the first time Sony has gone after Udio in court. Back in 2024, Sony joined Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group in a joint lawsuit against both Udio and Suno, another AI music generator. That case targeted 333 songs.

Since then, Sony used a legal process called discovery, where each side must hand over relevant evidence, to get a look inside Udio's training data. Training data is the library of existing material an AI system studies to learn how to produce outputs. Using a technique called audio fingerprinting, which matches a snippet of sound against a database of known recordings the way Shazam identifies a song on the radio, Sony says it spotted more than 30,000 of its tracks inside that data.

Sony asked the judge overseeing the original case to add all 30,000-plus songs to that lawsuit. The judge said no. So Sony filed a brand-new case.

In the filing, Sony says Udio itself admitted its AI models were "constructed by showing the program a vast amount of different kinds of sound recordings," including audio pulled from YouTube.

What does this mean for people who use Udio?

For now, Udio remains live and accessible. Nothing in the new lawsuit forces the service to shut down immediately. But if Sony wins, a court could order Udio to stop producing music that draws on Sony's catalogue, which is enormous, and force it to pay damages of up to $150,000 for every song found to have been copied. That could reshape what the tool is able to do.

The split inside the music industry is worth noting. Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group both settled with Udio and are now partnering with it, suggesting they see a commercial future alongside AI music tools. Sony is taking a harder line, at least for now.

The case, first flagged by Music Business Worldwide and later covered by The Verge AI, will be one to watch as it moves through the New York courts. The outcome could set a legal template for how AI companies across every creative field are allowed to use copyrighted material during training.