Background
On 24 June 2024, Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Music Group filed suit against Uncharted Labs Inc. (d/b/a Udio) in the Southern District of New York. The complaint alleges that “Udio copied Plaintiffs’ copyrighted sound recordings en masse and ingested them into its AI model,” and that the company’s AI music system was trained on their recordings without permission. Plaintiffs sought injunctive relief and statutory damages under the Copyright Act. On 31 October 2025 the parties filed a Notice of Settlement (ECF No. 133) stating that all claims had been resolved, followed by a Stipulation of Dismissal with Prejudice and a court Order of Dismissal dated 5 November 2025 terminating the case. No judicial finding on liability was made.
AI interaction
The complaint asserts that “because of their sheer popularity and exposure, the Copyrighted Recordings had to be included within Udio’s training data for Udio’s model to be successful at creating the desired human-sounding outputs.” (ECF No. 1) These claims place the lawfulness of training AI systems on commercial music datasets at the centre of copyright debate. The confidential settlement ended the litigation without a liability judgment but is widely viewed as a sign that rights-holders and AI developers are moving toward licensing and compliance frameworks for music-generation models.