Round Hill Music sues Anthropic, Suno for $1B over AI training

Round Hill Music, an independent music publisher, has filed two separate federal lawsuits in California against Anthropic and Suno, alleging unauthorized use of copyrighted music and lyrics to train their AI systems. The initial complaints identify 500 compositions—including Bonnie Tyler's 'Total Eclipse of the Heart,' the Goo Goo Dolls' 'Iris,' and James Brown's 'I Got You (I Feel Good)'—but Round Hill says the cases could eventually cover 10,000 or more works. According to Reuters, potential statutory damages could "potentially approach or conceivably exceed $1 billion." The claims differ by defendant: Anthropic is accused of copying lyrics to train Claude, while Suno allegedly copied both compositions and recordings for its music-generation model. The Suno suit also names data-scraping firm Bright Data as a co-defendant, and both complaints cite storage of unauthorized copies.

Round Hill CEO Josh Gruss said the company isn't anti-AI but opposes building billion-dollar businesses on unpaid creative labor. "We are not against artificial intelligence. We are against the idea that you can build a business worth billions on top of other people's creative work and pay the creators nothing," Gruss told Variety. Critically, the publisher says it won't settle for mere licensing deals and intends to take the cases to trial. This stance contrasts with recent industry settlements—Warner Music Group settled with Suno last year, and Suno announced a partnership with BMG. The lawsuits intensify the broader legal battle over whether AI training on copyrighted works qualifies as fair use, a question now spanning books, news, visual art, and music, with Anthropic already facing other lyric-related cases and Suno being sued separately by Universal Music Group and Sony Music.