A federal judge just denied Sony Music's bid to tack 30,442 more songs onto its copyright fight against Udio, capping the case at the original 333 works even as Sony presses forward alone against the AI startup.
Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein of the Southern District of New York ruled that Sony Music Entertainment cannot expand its lawsuit against Uncharted Labs, the company behind Udio, this late in the case. Sony had asked in May to add the recordings after gaining access to Udio's training data during discovery. Hellerstein said no. "Adding more than 30,000 works near the close of document discovery would require substantial additional production and review, generate further disputes, and materially alter the scope of the case before me," he wrote. He added that Sony has the right to sue over those recordings, but "there is no requirement that it be done in this lawsuit."
That distinction matters more than it sounds. Copyright law allows statutory damages up to $150,000 per work for willful infringement. Multiply that by 333 songs and Sony's maximum exposure against Udio sits around $50 million. Multiply it by 30,775 and you're near $4.6 billion. Hellerstein just kept that number small.
Sony is the last major label standing in this fight, and it didn't get there by choice.
Universal Music Group, Sony, and Warner Music Group filed the original suit against Udio together in June 2024, accusing the company of copying their recordings "en masse" to train its AI model. Universal broke ranks first. In late October 2025, it settled with Udio and announced a licensing deal for a joint AI music platform slated to launch in 2026, with a confidential payment covering past unlicensed use and an artist opt-in structure going forward. Warner followed in November, settling both its Udio claims and a parallel case against rival startup Suno, and striking its own licensing agreement.
Sony walked away from neither table.
Sony's calculation looks less like stubbornness and more like a bet. A courtroom finding that AI companies infringed copyright by training on unlicensed recordings would hand every label clout in every future negotiation, not just Sony's. Settling early trades that clout for a guaranteed check. Frankly, if you're the label most convinced you'd win at trial, why cash out now?
Sony hasn't limited that bet to Udio, either. It's still pursuing Suno, the other big AI music generator, alongside Universal in federal court in Massachusetts. A summary judgment hearing lands this month, in front of Chief Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV. Any ruling on fair use won't arrive before 2027.
Udio, for its part, has spent the past year turning lawsuits into partnerships. It's settled with two of the three majors and is building a platform where AI-generated tracks stay locked inside its own walls. They can't be exported to Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube. That structure lets labels license their catalogs for AI training without flooding streaming services with machine-made tracks that compete against their own artists. It's the model the industry seems to be converging on. One label just told a federal judge it isn't ready to sign on.
Hellerstein's ruling doesn't decide whether Udio infringed anything. It just keeps the trial manageable. But by holding Sony to 333 works instead of 30,775, he's also holding down the ceiling on what a verdict against Udio could cost, and that ceiling is exactly what both sides are now fighting over ahead of a case that increasingly looks headed for trial rather than settlement.
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