Sony Music expands Udio lawsuit, names 30,304 works as 'only a fraction' of alleged infringement

Sony Music moved to amend its copyright complaint against Udio on May 25, 2026, asking the court for permission to prosecute 30,304 specific recordings the label says the AI music platform trained on without authorization. The plaintiffs called the 30,304 figure “only a fraction” of the works identified inside Udio’s training data. The expansion lands two years and one discovery marathon into a suit Udio formally answered in late April. Universal Music and Warner Music have already settled their separate Udio claims, leaving Sony as the last major still in court ahead of a status conference scheduled for July 10, 2026.

Audible Magic changed the math

Sony’s amended complaint describes a systematic process for identifying its copyrighted works inside Udio’s training dataset, with Audible Magic as the fingerprint engine. The scan returned, in Sony’s words, “hundreds of thousands” of matches. From that pool, Sony elected to formally prosecute 30,304 works.

The legal text spells out the choice. “Plaintiffs have a sufficient basis to assert claims against Udio as to all the works they own or control that returned match results within Udio’s training data,” the filing reads, per Digital Music News. “However, in the interest of ensuring the orderly progress of this litigation and facilitating swift resolution of the key issues, Plaintiffs have elected to prosecute Udio’s use and reproduction of approximately 30,304 works.”

The mechanic is the story. Audible Magic is a commercial content-matching service the majors already pay for, primarily to police unlicensed uploads on the stream side. Sony’s filing points the same pipe at an AI music generator’s training corpus and reports clean results at catalog scale. Udio’s legal team opposed the amendment, arguing the expansion would “effectively start discovery over from scratch with respect to tens of thousands of additional works and multiple new parties,” delaying the fair-use ruling by months. The walled-garden app Udio is preparing alongside Spotify’s licensed AI tools arrives into this courtroom backdrop.

What it means for indie artists and AI tool users

For working artists, two reads. First, catalog-level forensics on AI training data are now a working product, not a theory. If your masters sit inside an AI music generator’s training set, fingerprint identification is the same technology that has caught unlicensed YouTube uploads for a decade. The Spotify training-data question looks different once you know the matching scan is this cheap and this accurate.

Second, the Sony fair-use ruling, when it lands, sets the price every other AI music platform pays to license. Suno settled with Warner. ElevenLabs and Stability shipped under licensed-data banners. Udio’s outcome will quietly set the floor for everyone else, and indie label deals will reprice against whatever number falls out of this docket.