Round Hill Sues Suno and Anthropic for Copyright Infringement

When two AI copyright lawsuits end, two more begin: Round Hill has fired off high-stakes infringement complaints – each involving sought damages that could “conceivably exceed $1 billion”– against Suno and Anthropic.

Round Hill submitted the actions to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California today. By now, a multitude of firmly worded suits and several setbacks later, rightsholders are zeroing in on a few key arguments as they demand infringement damages from gen AI developers.

As such, some of Richard S. Busch-repped Round Hill’s newest claims will sound familiar to those who’ve been following artificial intelligence litigation.

For example, Suno allegedly ingested all manner of the plaintiff’s compositions to train its models – while also allegedly removing copyright management information (CMI) “and training the AI models themselves to disregard the CMI in both its training and output to conceal the infringement.”

Additionally, the BMG-partnered AI giant is accused of violating the DMCA by allegedly “circumventing technological access controls” en route to obtaining protected audio via licensed platforms.

Anthropic, for its part, is staring down similar claims, and the suits point “preliminarily” to the alleged infringement of “500 bell-weather musical compositions” – with the distinct possibility of supersizing each action.

“Plaintiffs plan to ultimately amend to list potentially ten thousand or more of their musical compositions and sound recordings, meaning that the total statutory damages sought in this case would ultimately exceed hundreds of millions of dollars and potentially approach or conceivably exceed $1 billion,” the complaints read.

In short, then, with a massive pile of potential damages hanging in the balance, these are certainly serious cases for the defendants. Separately, the actions are significant in that they cover plenty of new ground as well.

First, undeterred by the contributory infringement precedent ushered in by the Supreme Court’s unanimous Cox v. Sony decision, Round Hill and its legal team opted to take aim at a little-discussed defendant alongside Suno.

To be sure, the appropriate suit also counts as a defendant Netanya, Israel-based Bright Data, a self-described provider of “[a]ward winning proxy networks, powerful web scrapers, and ready-to-use datasets.”

And it’s Bright Data, which X sued in 2023 for allegedly building “an illicit data-scraping business on the backs of innovative technology companies,” that’s facing a contributory claim here.

“Bright Data’s tools are specifically designed to scrape music files en masse and strip them of CMI and otherwise prepare them to train AI Models,” according to Round Hill. “These tools not only violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s anti-circumvention and anti-removal of CMI provisions, but also render Bright Data contributorily liable for Suno’s copyright infringement.

“Like the other Defendants, Bright Data has created enormous revenue by selling its tools to copyright infringers, enjoying 50% year-on-year revenue growth, surpassing $300 million in revenue in 2025 with a projected Annual Recurring Revenue projection of $400 million in 2026,” the suit continues.

Next, notwithstanding Anthropic’s prior emphasis on Claude’s guardrails, Round Hill definitely isn’t throwing in the towel when it comes to the chatbot’s allegedly infringing outputs.

“Despite implementing partial output filters in response to prior litigation,” a relevant section sums up, “Anthropic has failed to prevent Claude from reproducing the vast majority of Round Hill’s catalog. Anthropic’s continued operation of Claude with knowledge that it generates infringing outputs constitutes willful infringement.”

Finally, far from shying away from the fair use question – which gen AI developers have embraced, not without success, from the outset – Round Hill is adamant that the defendants’ alleged “permanent stockpile of copyrighted material…fails every factor of the fair-use analysis.”

“Suno has engaged in the exact same conduct: the indefinite retention of unlicensed copies of copyrighted works, under Bartz I, does not constitute fair use,” the Suno suit spells out.

“Building and maintaining a permanent stockpile of copyrighted material for open-ended future exploitation fails every factor of the fair-use analysis: the purpose is acquisitive rather than transformative; entire works are retained without limitation; and the unauthorized copies function as market substitutes, displacing sales and licenses on a one-to-one basis.”

Suno declined to comment on Round Hill’s complaint, and Anthropic didn’t respond in time for publishing.

But evidently, the initially highlighted voluntary dismissal of two other Suno suits (plus the multiple ongoing complaints against Anthropic) wasn’t accompanied by an across-the-board litigation pause, and we’ll continue tracking these newest actions from here.