Suno replaces its AI models with a new one trained on licensed music as copyright suits pile up
TechCrunch Ivan Mehta ● Covered by 4 sources
Suno just swapped in a new music model trained on licensed tracks. It’s trying to answer copyright lawsuits by building with labels instead of around them.
Based on reporting by TechCrunch, Ivan Mehta — read the original for the full story.
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Suno has rolled out Suno v6, a new family of music-making models that it says was trained on licensed material from companies including Warner Music Group, BMG and Believe. That matters because the startup is still being dragged through copyright fights over whether it trained earlier models on protected songs without permission.
The company says v6 was not trained on the same data used for its older models, and it plans to retire those previous versions. That is a pretty direct reset. Suno is also splitting the new lineup into three options: a base v6 model for paying users that’s meant to be more reliable and easier to control, a “wild” version for paying users that leans into surprise and experimentation, and a smaller v6 mini model that’s faster and open to everyone.
The newer model is built for more fiddly edits too. Suno says users can change a section of a track with a prompt or even a word from the lyrics, use text, images or video as references, and separate an instrument from a sample to build something new from it. And the company says it wants to add remixing, but only if artists opt into a program it’s setting up with labels to allow Suno to use their songs in AI-generated features.
That pitch is not happening in a vacuum. Suno already settled with Warner Music Group last year and reached a deal with BMG last month, but it still faces suits from Sony and Universal Music Group, along with artists such as Jason Isbell and users who say the company ignored security while chasing growth. On top of that, Suno admitted just a day before this launch that it had trained models using YouTube videos. It has also said it will add a watermark to generated songs and has tightened download limits based on account tier.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
Suno is doing what a lot of AI companies eventually do when the lawyers get loud enough: wrap the product in licensing and call it a strategy. That’s cleaner than the old “move fast, ask for forgiveness” routine, and it probably has to happen if music AI wants to survive outside the hype cycle. The funny part is that the industry is now being sold the same rights-first story it spent years saying was impossible.
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