Independent publisher Round Hill Music has filed separate copyright lawsuits against Anthropic and Suno in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, accusing both companies of training their AI systems on its catalog without permission or compensation. The Anthropic suit centers on lyrics, alleging Claude was trained on more than 500 Round Hill-controlled compositions, including James Brown’s ‘I Got You (I Feel Good)’ and the Goo Goo Dolls’ ‘Iris.’ The Suno complaint targets master recordings from the same catalog, among them Bonnie Tyler’s ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ and Dio’s ‘Holy Diver.’
Round Hill says it may expand both cases to cover more than 10,000 compositions, with potential damages that could exceed $1 billion under statutory copyright penalties. CEO Josh Gruss framed the lawsuits as a matter of principle rather than opposition to AI itself, arguing that licensing exists to protect the people who created the underlying work, not to block innovation. The publisher’s attorney, Richard Busch, best known for his work on the landmark ‘Blurred Lines’ case, argued the companies built enormously valuable businesses on copyrighted material while the original creators saw none of that value.
The filings add Round Hill to a growing list of rights holders taking generative AI platforms to court. Suno is already fighting lawsuits from all three major labels, having settled and struck a licensing deal with Warner in November 2025 while Universal Music Group and Sony remain in active litigation. The platform also faces a separate suit from law firm Hagens Berman on behalf of independent artists, alleging its models trained on tens of millions of copyrighted recordings. 
With statutory damages of up to $150,000 per willfully infringed work on the table, and Round Hill signaling it intends to go to trial rather than settle, the case adds fresh weight to the mounting legal pressure facing AI companies over how their models were trained.
