Round Hill is suing Suno and Anthropic for up to $1B apiece. It isn’t looking to settle.
Round Hill Music has filed copyright infringement lawsuits against AI music generator Suno and AI company Anthropic in the US District Court for the Northern California, saying it will not settle either case. The independent music company, which owns or controls over 14,000 compositions and nearly 17,000 sound recordings, argues that both firms built valuable AI businesses using copyrighted material without paying or crediting the songwriters and artists who created it.
Each lawsuit seeks statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work wilfully infringed, which Round Hill says could total hundreds of millions of dollars and potentially exceed $1 billion. The complaints, filed on 17 August, each cite an initial exhibit of 500 works — including songs by James Brown, the Goo Goo Dolls and Bonnie Tyler — with plans to expand coverage to potentially 10,000 or more compositions; the Suno case also names data-scraping firm Bright Data as a co-defendant for allegedly enabling the unauthorised harvesting of music and lyrics. Round Hill has hired trial lawyer Richard S. Busch, who won the "Blurred Lines" case, and both suits demand a jury trial, signalling the company's intent to fight rather than negotiate a settlement.
- Round Hill sues Suno and Anthropic, seeking up to $1bn each
- Claims wilful copyright infringement, no plans to settle
- Both suits demand a jury trial; damages could top $1bn
New here? Start with this
Round Hill Music is an independent music company that owns or manages rights to songs and recordings. Those rights can include control over how music is copied or used, and whether permission or payment is required.
Suno makes software that generates music from written prompts, while Anthropic develops AI systems such as chatbots. AI companies train their systems on large collections of material; disputes arise when that material includes copyrighted works and the owners say it was used without permission.
The cases concern how copyright law applies when music is used to develop AI tools. Their outcome could affect what AI companies need to do when using creative work, and how songwriters, artists and rights holders are paid or credited.
Both sides, in good faith
The strongest fair case each way — we don't pick a winner.
The case for
AI training represents a form of transformative use akin to search engines and libraries, creating something fundamentally new rather than competing with originals. Proponents argue that requiring explicit licensing for training data across millions of works would be administratively impossible and would stifle beneficial AI innovation that could ultimately serve society. Fair use doctrine has historically protected transformative technologies from immediate licensing requirements, and overly restrictive copyright enforcement could slow technological progress that may benefit creators and consumers alike.
The case against
Artists and songwriters created valuable intellectual property deserving of protection and compensation, and using their work to train commercial AI systems without permission or payment represents unfair exploitation. The power imbalance is stark: large technology companies profit from countless individual creators with no consent or remuneration. Fair use doctrine should not extend to commercial systems that could eventually substitute for human creativity, and creators deserve both the right to control how their work is used and to benefit from its commercialisation.