July 15, 2026 — Hagens Berman joins the class actions. DMCA claims upheld. Suno raises $400M while fighting to keep its training data secret. The war over AI music generation has entered a new phase.
On June 22, 2026, the law firm Hagens Berman—the firm that secured a $260 billion settlement against the tobacco industry—formally joined the independent artists’ class actions against Suno and Udio. Partnering with Delgado Entertainment Law, the firm filed an amended complaint against Udio in the Southern District of New York and expanded the legal team on the Suno case.
Steve Berman, managing partner: “Independent artists and producers represent the heart and soul of the music industry, and in the landscape of AI, they stand to lose the most. We believe that Udio and Suno have blatantly stolen works from millions of independent artists.”
The suits allege that both companies scraped tens of millions of publicly available sources, the majority being songs owned and controlled by independent artists, bypassing technical safeguards on platforms like YouTube and Spotify. Named plaintiffs include Anthony Justice, 5th Wheel Records Inc., and Heartland Publishing LLC. The proposed classes cover independent musicians and producers who published music on streaming platforms since January 1, 2021, including a subclass for artists whose names, voices, likenesses, producer tags, or other identifying elements were misappropriated.
Status: Amended complaint filed. Suno motion to dismiss pending.
On May 21, 2026, the federal court in the Udio case denied in part Udio’s motion to dismiss, specifically upholding the plaintiffs’ claims under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The DMCA prohibits circumventing technological measures that control access to copyrighted works. The plaintiffs argue that scraping songs from streaming platforms required bypassing those platforms’ protections.
This is a significant procedural win. The DMCA provides for statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work willfully infringed, plus injunctive relief. If the class action survives summary judgment on these claims, the potential exposure is enormous.
Status: DMCA claims survive. Discovery proceeding.
In June 2026, Suno closed a $400 million Series D funding round despite the ongoing litigation—a signal that investors are betting either on settlement, victory, or the proposition that licensing deals with major labels are sufficient cover. Suno now has 2 million paid subscribers, generates 7 million songs per day, and reports annual recurring revenue of $300 million.
At the same time, Suno is fighting in court to conceal a single number: the total volume of audio files used to train its models. In a June 2026 filing, the company argued that revealing this figure would allow competitors to “replicate and benchmark against Suno’s models” and “infer aspects of Suno’s training and development process.” Co-founder and CTO Georg Kucsko submitted a supporting declaration.
Status: Disputed. Training data volume remains under seal.
The major labels are no longer a united front:
Sony’s position is strategically significant. If a court rules that training on copyrighted recordings is not fair use, every AI music company must license training data or face liability. If the court accepts the fair use defense, the licensing leverage that UMG and Warner secured evaporates. The entire industry is waiting.
Status: Sony cases pending. Fair-use ruling expected summer 2026.
Meanwhile, the Authors Guild class action against OpenAI continues to expand. In October 2025, the SDNY court delivered one of the first U.S. rulings holding that an LLM’s plot summaries of copyrighted novels may themselves constitute infringement—an output-infringement holding that has no direct parallel in the music cases but establishes a critical principle: the outputs matter as much as the inputs.
Discovery in the consolidated cases is now underway. The court has ordered OpenAI to produce sample outputs across all named plaintiffs’ titles, and the evidence universe is large enough that the parties are negotiating a discovery protocol modeled on the log-preservation regime from New York Times v. Microsoft. Lieff Cabraser represents the Authors Guild and the plaintiff class.
Status: Active. Discovery phase. No trial date.
Universal Music Group, Concord, and ABKCO filed a second lawsuit against Anthropic in January 2026 covering more than 20,000 songs, with potential damages exceeding $3 billion. It is the largest non-class-action copyright case in United States history. The case leans heavily on Judge Alsup’s July 2025 ruling in Bartz v. Anthropic: training on legally acquired content may be fair use; training on pirated material is not.
Status: Active litigation in Tennessee. No trial date.
Beaumont & Sheridan is an information resource for individual creators. This post does not constitute legal advice.