Music Publisher Round Hill Sues Suno (and Anthropic) for Up to $1 Billion Over AI Training
Independent music publisher Round Hill Music has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Suno in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging the company trained its AI models on copyrighted songs and lyrics without a license. Round Hill filed a separate, parallel suit against Anthropic the same day. The publisher says statutory damages could total “hundreds of millions of dollars and potentially approach or conceivably exceed $1 billion” against each company.
Details
- Plaintiffs: Round Hill Music LP together with five affiliated funds and holding companies
- Core allegations against Suno: Direct copyright infringement, circumvention of access controls under the DMCA, and removal of copyright management information
- Bright Data named as co-defendant: Round Hill alleges data-scraping firm Bright Data supplied proxy networks and scraping tools that let Suno collect copyrighted material from licensed platforms including YouTube Music, Deezer, and Genius — one of the first cases pulling a scraping vendor into AI music litigation as a contributory infringer
- Named works: The initial complaint centers on songs including the Goo Goo Dolls’ “Iris,” Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” and James Brown’s “I Got You (I Feel Good),” with roughly 500 compositions listed and plans to amend the complaint to cover potentially over 10,000 works
- Damages sought: Up to $150,000 per work willfully infringed under the Copyright Act
- Round Hill CEO Josh Gruss: “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.”
- Counsel Richard S. Busch: “There is nothing fair about that use, and we look forward to making our arguments to the Court and in front of a jury.”
- Round Hill’s counsel has indicated it is not seeking a settlement and intends to litigate
This follows a summer of legal pressure on Suno, including UMG’s ongoing case (where a judge just denied the labels’ bid to expand the suit from 560 to over 61,000 recordings) and two class-action lawsuits over Suno’s November 2025 data breach.
What happened next
- Neither Suno, Bright Data, nor Anthropic had issued a public statement at the time of filing; reporters have requested comment from all three
- The case adds to a growing docket of AI-music copyright litigation against Suno, alongside the existing UMG Recordings suit
- Track further developments via Suno’s official site (suno.com) and court filings in the Northern District of California