Suno has put in writing, in its own pleading, that audio from YouTube was gathered with the open-source downloader YT-DLP and used as training data for its music generator. The statement sits in the company's answer to the amended complaint brought by Universal's UMG Recordings and Capitol Records together with Sony Music, a 26-page filing lodged on September 1 in federal court in Massachusetts and reported by Music Business Worldwide a week later. The same admission is repeated at five further points in the document, each time in near-identical language about audio data obtained from YouTube.
The concession itself is not new information. According to the judge's earlier order, Suno had already told the labels in May 2025 that it downloaded YouTube files using tools such as YT-DL and YT-DLP. What changes is its status: it is now a formal admission in Suno's answer rather than something disclosed in discovery. It also sits beside a figure Suno accepts about scale, that its model learned from tens of millions of recordings taken from publicly available sources, and a statement that more than 12 million users have made tracks on the service.
Suno does not concede liability. It still argues that any copying of protected expression was fair use, describing its training as an internal technical step that feeds a new, non-infringing product. It keeps a defence it has used since 2024, that the labels' claims are undermined by copyright misuse and "unclean hands", and accuses them of anticompetitive conduct that extends a monopoly over making and selling music. Among 13 affirmative defences it also says any infringement was innocent, which could cut statutory damages to as little as $200 a work, while the labels seek up to $150,000 for each of the 560 recordings in the case.
The newest line of attack targets the stream-ripping claim specifically. Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV let the labels add a claim under the anti-circumvention part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act on August 18, after Suno had argued the statute covers access controls rather than copy controls. Suno now says one or more of the labels lack constitutional standing for that claim and are not injured parties under the statute. Those arguments reach only the circumvention count, not the two copyright infringement counts.
The filing also shows how closely Suno and its rival Udio are being defended. Udio's answer to Sony in April used the same wording on fair use and misuse, and the same Latham & Watkins lawyers are named on both documents. Suno further accepts that the labels do not appear to claim its outputs infringe their recordings, while denying that similarities in those outputs prove the songs were in its training set. Its first answer, in August 2024, had described its training data only as nearly all reasonable-quality music on the open internet, named no source, and raised no standing argument at all.
Warner Music Group settled with Suno in November 2025 and licensed it, leaving Universal, Capitol and Sony as plaintiffs; the court had also declined, for now, to let them add another 61,026 recordings. Fact discovery was due to close on September 30, with both sides expected to seek summary judgment on fair use. Away from court, Suno has promised licensed models built with industry partners that will replace everything it trained before, has signed BMG, and has capped monthly downloads for its subscribers.
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