Round Hill Music Sues Suno and Anthropic for Up to $1 Billion Each Over AI Training on Copyrighted Songs
Round Hill Music has filed copyright infringement lawsuits against AI companies Suno and Anthropic, seeking damages that could approach or exceed $1 billion in each case — and the music publisher says it has no intention of settling either one.
The complaints were filed on Monday, August 17, 2026, in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, according to Reuters. The plaintiffs are Round Hill Music LP and five affiliated funds and holding companies that own or control 14,364 musical compositions and 16,873 sound recordings — a catalogue spanning some of the most recognisable songs in popular music.
Works at issue include 'Iris' by the Goo Goo Dolls, 'Total Eclipse of the Heart' (written by Jim Steinman, performed by Bonnie Tyler) and 'I Got You (I Feel Good)' by James Brown. Round Hill says those songs alone have been streamed over six billion times combined.
Each lawsuit attaches an exhibit of 500 compositions, described in the filings as a "prioritised representative bellwether" — a sample that lets the court evaluate the claims without litigating every track at once. Round Hill plans to amend both cases to cover potentially ten thousand or more works, which would multiply the stakes considerably if the court accepts the approach.
The complaints claim direct infringement under the Copyright Act, the core US law protecting creative works. They also allege violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, specifically circumvention of access controls — the technical locks that prevent unauthorised copying — and removal of copyright management information, the embedded data identifying who owns a work.
The Suno complaint adds another defendant: Bright Data Ltd., an Israeli data-scraping firm, along with its US subsidiary Bright Data, Inc. Round Hill alleges that Bright Data supplied the proxy networks and scraping tools that allowed Suno to extract music and lyrics from licensed streaming platforms, making the company liable for contributory infringement — a legal theory that holds a party responsible for knowingly helping someone else infringe.
Round Hill's lawsuit claims Anthropic has known since at least 2024 that its AI training practices allegedly violated Round Hill's copyrights, per The Northern California Record. Anthropic won a key US ruling on AI training in a separate authors' copyright lawsuit in June 2025, Reuters reported at the time, though that decision involved different plaintiffs and a different set of facts.
The legal team carries notable weight. Round Hill is represented by Richard S. Busch of Adams and Reese LLP, who won the 'Blurred Lines' copyright case for Marvin Gaye's family — a landmark verdict that found Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams copied Gaye's 'Got to Give It Up'. He is joined by Andrew H. Davis and David Niemierzycki, California attorney Mark L. Block, and Skaggs Faucette LLP as local counsel. Both complaints demand a jury trial.
Round Hill founder and CEO Josh Gruss said the company intends to take the cases all the way to trial and will not accept a resolution that leaves songwriters and artists deprived of their rightful compensation. The statutory damages sought — up to $150,000 per work willfully infringed — are the maximum available under US copyright law, and with thousands of works potentially in play, the figures scale fast.
The cases arrive amid a wave of litigation pitting rightsholders against AI developers over training data. What sets this one apart is the catalogue's depth, the decision to name a data-scraping intermediary as a co-defendant, and the plaintiff's flat refusal to settle. Most AI copyright disputes so far have moved toward negotiation or incremental court rulings. Round Hill is asking a jury to decide whether building a music AI on copyrighted songs without permission is infringement — full stop.
