Round Hill Music has sued Suno and Anthropic in the United States for copyright infringement, CMU reported on August 19, 2026. The claim against Suno also names the Israeli company Bright Data, on the basis that Suno used its tools to scrape millions of tracks illegally from platforms such as YouTube while building its training dataset.
The core of both filings is the same: that the two companies made unlicensed copies of recordings and songs the music rights business owns and controls in order to train their respective models.
Josh Gruss, who runs the company, framed the action carefully. "We are not against artificial intelligence," he said, but against the idea that a business worth billions can be built on other people's creative work while the creators are paid nothing. Securing a licence, he argued, protects the legal owners of the raw material rather than obstructing innovation, and an independent music company has both the freedom and the obligation to say so.
Both defendants say training on existing material is fair use under US copyright law, which would mean no permission and no licence was needed. Round Hill argues the defence fails here in part because of what it calls the indefinite retention of unlicensed copies: a permanent stockpile of copyrighted material held for open-ended future use, the filing says, is acquisitive rather than transformative and fails every factor of the analysis.
Richard Busch, the lawyer working with the company, said the question is not complicated, that copyrighted works have been used to build multi-billion dollar businesses while the songwriters and publishers behind them received nothing, and that Anthropic is now valued at more than a trillion dollars. "There is nothing fair about that use," he said, adding that he looks forward to making the argument in front of a jury.
Neither defendant is new to this. Suno has agreed licensing deals with Warner Music and BMG but is still fighting litigation from Universal Music and Sony Music, plus cases brought by independent musicians. Anthropic's most prominent copyright case, brought by a group of book authors, ended in a $1.5 billion settlement, and music publishers have sued the company over lyrics they say it copied to train its Claude system; Anthropic has moved to have part of that lyrics case dismissed. The two new filings were set out here in more detail.
Round Hill Music describes itself as a private equity platform managing a $1.1 billion portfolio of music rights. As well as running the funds that own those rights, it operates as a label and a publisher.
The facts
- Round Hill Music filed copyright suits against Suno and Anthropic in the US.
- The Suno case also names the Israeli firm Bright Data.
- Round Hill says both made unlicensed copies of its recordings and songs.
- Suno and Anthropic both argue that AI training is fair use.
- Richard Busch is the lawyer acting for Round Hill.
- Anthropic settled a book authors' copyright case for $1.5 billion.
- Suno has licensing deals with Warner Music and BMG.
- Round Hill manages a $1.1 billion portfolio of music rights.
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