Independent music publisher Round Hill Music has brought two separate actions before the federal court for the Northern District of California, one against Anthropic and one against Suno, claiming that both companies used hundreds of songs from its catalogue without authorisation to train their artificial intelligence systems. In Anthropic’s case the claim concerns the lyrics of at least five hundred songs, including works by James Brown, The Kinks and the Goo Goo Dolls, used to teach the model to respond to user prompts; against Suno, the allegation concerns the use of the same songs to train its music generation system.
Round Hill has indicated that the claims may be amended to cover ten thousand or more compositions, with damages that could approach or exceed one billion dollars. The publisher has also requested a jury trial, signalling its intention not to follow the route of settlements and licensing agreements taken by other operators in the sector. In statements to the press, the company’s chief executive clarified that he is not opposed to artificial intelligence as such, but to the idea that a business of enormous value can be built on other people’s creative work without any compensation to the creators, adding that licensing is not an obstacle to innovation but the tool that protects the owners of the raw material used.
The two cases add to an already considerable number of proceedings pitting copyright owners, from book authors to news outlets, against the companies developing artificial intelligence models. Anthropic is already a defendant in similar proceedings brought by Universal Music Group, BMG Rights Management and others, again in relation to the use of song lyrics for training; and last year it became the first major company in the sector to settle a case of this kind, with the one-and-a-half-billion-dollar settlement that resolved the class action brought by a group of authors. Suno, for its part, has been sued by all three major record labels, has settled with Warner Music Group and recently concluded a licensing agreement with BMG.
Round Hill Music sues Anthropic and Suno over AI training
