The Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group settlements with the AI generators Suno and Udio were sold as peace deals. The American Federation of Musicians has just argued they are unpaid invoices.
What is the union actually claiming?
The AFM, the union that represents performing and recording musicians across the United States and Canada, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on 5 June 2026. The complaint does not attack the AI deals as illegal. It says the majors owe their own members a share of the proceeds and have not paid.
The lever is contractual. The union's collective bargaining agreement with the majors carries a 'new uses' provision: when recordings musicians played on are put to a new commercial use, the labels have to compensate them. Feeding masters into a model that then sells AI-generated music is, in the union's reading, exactly that. The complaint puts it plainly, accusing the labels of having 'failed to share in the settlement proceeds and future revenue with those same artists whose music was copied, used for training, and incorporated into the development of the AI models and platforms now being commercially exploited.'
The fight everyone framed as copyright was always, underneath, a fight about labour and who gets paid for the work already done.
How did the deals line up?
Universal settled with Udio in late October 2025. Warner reached its own Udio deal in mid-November 2025, then became the first major to settle with Suno later that same month. Those settlements arrived alongside Suno's own momentum on the funding side, the company having since closed a large raise that pushed its valuation into the billions. The union's point is that value flowed in two directions, into the labels as settlement cash and into the AI firms as a cleared catalogue, while the musicians who supplied the raw material were left out of both.
What does the AFM want?
Two things. First, monetary damages, left unspecified in the filing. Second, and arguably more important, disclosure: the union is demanding the labels reveal exactly which recordings were used to train the models. The AFM is represented by attorney Eyad Asad of Cohen Weiss & Simon.
Both majors pushed back. A Universal spokesperson said the company has been 'at the forefront of protecting the rights and advancing the interests of artists and songwriters in the age of AI,' adding that the AFM 'chose this route during our collective bargaining negotiations' and that the matter belongs at the bargaining table. Warner has previously framed its AI work as 'establishing guardrails and architecting a healthy AI ecosystem on the behalf of artists everywhere.'
