What Changed in September 2026
On September 18, 2026, Universal Music Group and Sony Music filed a second copyright infringement lawsuit against Suno, The Hollywood Reporter reported. The suit alleges that Suno built its newly launched v6 model using knowledge distillation and related model transfer techniques from outputs of its earlier models, which the labels say were themselves trained on their recordings without authorization or payment, meaning the new model reproduces and exploits their catalog by extension.
The suit does not concern a listing, and none of the sources reviewed for this update mention a public offering; Suno's valuation, subscriber, and revenue figures described above are unchanged since June 2026.
A valuation climbing faster than the lawsuits can resolve
Suno's Series D closed June 3, 2026: $400 million led by Bond Capital, with IVP, Forerunner, Union Square Ventures, Alkeon Capital, and Quiet joining existing backers Matrix, Lightspeed, Menlo Ventures, and Schroders Capital, at a $5.4 billion valuation, according to Variety and Bloomberg. That was more than double the $2.45 billion valuation Suno reached just seven months earlier with a $250 million Series C led by Menlo Ventures, which itself followed a $125 million Series B in May 2024 at an estimated $500 million valuation, per TechCrunch.
CEO Mikey Shulman wrote in a blog post announcing the round that Suno had surpassed 2 million paid subscribers in February 2026 and reached roughly $300 million in annualized revenue, up from the $200 million in annual revenue the company told the Wall Street Journal it had reached the previous November. None of Suno's funding announcements have mentioned a public listing.
One settlement, two suits still open, and a new one in August
Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Music Group all sued Suno in 2024, alleging it trained its models on copyrighted recordings without permission. Warner Music was the first to break away: on November 25, 2025, it announced it had settled its suit and signed a licensing deal with Suno, under which Suno also acquired Warner's Songkick concert-discovery platform and agreed to launch new, licensed models built on Warner's catalog, according to TechCrunch. Universal and Sony did not settle, and their suits remain active, seeking statutory damages that Forbes reported could run into the billions.
In August 2026, independent music publisher Round Hill Music filed separate copyright suits against Suno and Anthropic seeking up to $1 billion apiece, and said through its counsel that it does not intend to settle either case, according to the Hollywood Reporter and Music Business Worldwide.
A German court became the first to actually rule
On July 31, 2026, a court in Munich ruled that Suno infringed copyrights represented by GEMA, Germany's music-collecting society, finding that Suno had obtained its training data by stream-ripping audio from the open web and had stored near-complete copies of specific songs that it could reproduce almost note for note on request, Forbes reported. Suno had already conceded before the verdict that it trained on GEMA's repertoire without a license, resting its defense solely on the argument that training itself does not require one; the court rejected that argument.
The ruling also asserted that German law reaches training conducted entirely in the United States, because the resulting outputs are served to users in Germany -- a jurisdictional theory that, if it survives appeal, exposes any AI company with European users to European collecting-society litigation regardless of where its models were built. The Munich court additionally ordered Suno to disclose the revenue it earned from the infringing works before any damages figure is set; Suno has said it disagrees with the ruling and is evaluating an appeal. None of this bears on a Suno IPO directly, but it is the clearest evidence yet that the settlement Warner Music reached in November 2025 -- without any court finding of liability -- was not the end of Suno's legal exposure, and any specific 'Suno IPO date' circulating online remains speculation with no S-1 or executive statement behind it.