According to reporting published on 24 July 2026, Sony Music Entertainment and several affiliated labels have filed a separate action in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York against Uncharted Labs, the company behind Udio. The complaint alleges that more than 30,000 protected sound recordings were copied and used without authorization to train Udio’s generative AI models. The new case was filed on 20 July under case number 1:26-cv-06120. Sony says the additional works were identified through audio-fingerprinting analysis conducted after discovery in the earlier 2024 litigation; because the court did not permit the labels to add that large body of works to the original case, they brought a second action. The allegations and liability remain to be tested in court.
The dispute moves the AI-training debate toward a more granular question: whether a platform can document exactly what entered its training corpus, how each recording was obtained, and what permissions covered its use. For AI music providers, risk no longer turns only on whether outputs resemble existing songs. Training-stage copying, provenance records, licensing scope, and model-version logs may become central evidence. Platforms that cannot produce an auditable chain of data and permissions will face a weaker position in both litigation and licensing negotiations, while rights holders may increasingly rely on audio fingerprinting to identify and quantify alleged training uses.
