Round Hill Music filed copyright infringement lawsuits against Suno and Anthropic on Monday, alleging the AI companies trained their models on the firm's $1.1 billion catalog of musical works without authorization.
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Round Hill sues Suno, Anthropic over $1.1B music catalog
Round Hill Music filed copyright infringement lawsuits against Suno and Anthropic on Monday, alleging the AI companies trained their models on the firm's $1.1 billion catalog of musical works without authorization.
Round Hill Music filed copyright infringement lawsuits against Suno and Anthropic on Monday, alleging the AI companies used its $1.1 billion catalog of musical works without authorization or compensation to train their models.
"We believe that innovation and respect for intellectual property must go hand in hand to ensure a sustainable ecosystem for creators, rights holders and the companies developing tomorrow's technologies," Alexandre Saboundjian, CEO of Winamp Group, said in June when Jamendo filed its own suit against Suno over the same issue.
The Nashville-based private equity firm, founded in 2010, manages a portfolio of music rights spanning multiple genres. The lawsuits target Suno's music generation platform and Anthropic's audio models. The filing comes as Suno faces a widening legal front: Jamendo, the Winamp Group subsidiary, dropped its copyright suit against Suno on August 13 without prejudice, days after the Munich Regional Court ruled against the AI company in a case brought by Germany's collecting society GEMA.
The litigation adds to the mounting financial exposure for AI companies training on copyrighted music. Suno raised more than $400 million in a Series D round in June at a $5.4 billion valuation, and has already settled with Warner Music Group and BMG. Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment continue to pursue a separate action in Massachusetts, seeking to add 61,026 recordings to their case against Suno.
The Round Hill filing marks the latest escalation in a wave of copyright actions against AI music companies. Jamendo, which sued Suno on June 29 over its MTG-Jamendo Dataset of more than 55,000 tracks, filed a notice of voluntary dismissal in the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts on August 13. The case was withdrawn without prejudice, leaving Jamendo free to bring the same claims again. Jamendo also sued chipmaker Nvidia on June 22 over the alleged use of the same dataset, with a related commercial claim of about 16 million euros ($18.2 million) pending in Belgium's Ghent Enterprise Court.
Suno has been negotiating settlements alongside the litigation. The company announced a global alliance with BMG on August 12 covering BMG's recorded music and publishing repertoire, following its November 2025 settlement and licensing partnership with Warner Music Group, which also saw Suno acquire ticketing platform Songkick. Suno co-founder and CEO Mikey Shulman published a set of company principles on August 6, pledging to adopt audio watermarking and fingerprinting technology "in the coming weeks" and to introduce a new downloads policy designed to limit mass distribution of songs on streaming platforms. The company screens uploaded audio files and lyrics through Audible Magic, Musixmatch and other third-party providers, according to the same post. Audible Magic is the same fingerprinting service UMG and Sony Music used to identify their recordings inside Suno's training data.
Legal Front Expands Beyond Suno
Anthropic faces its own copyright scrutiny. The Round Hill suit is among the first music copyright actions against Anthropic, which has primarily faced litigation from authors and publishers over its Claude language models. The company has argued that training on copyrighted material falls under fair use, a position that courts have yet to fully resolve.
The broader legal environment for AI music companies remains unsettled. Suno lost a copyright case in Germany on July 31, when the Munich Regional Court found in a first-instance ruling on six test compositions that the company was not entitled to train its models on works represented by GEMA. Denmark's Koda has a separate claim against Suno in Europe, while independent artist Anthony Justice and 5th Wheel Records are leading a US class action. A separate suit from Poseidon Wave Media, the entity behind instrumental duo The American Dollar, was dismissed with prejudice in May.
Suno, valued at $5.4 billion after its June Series D, has been moving to license music rather than fight every case. The BMG deal and the earlier Warner Music settlement suggest the company is building a licensing framework that could eventually cover the full catalog of major rights holders. For Anthropic, the Round Hill suit adds music copyright to a growing list of legal challenges, though the company's position on fair use remains untested in court for music specifically.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
