Corporate Counsel Daily, Music publisher comes back to the basics in lawsuits over Suno and Claude, (Aug 19, 2026)

By Matthew Hersh, J.D.

The artificial intelligence companies allegedly trained on unlicensed materials and also returned substantially similar lyrics in response to user prompts.

Two leading artificial intelligence services and a company that allegedly scraped song lyrics on behalf of one of them committed violations of the Copyright Act and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a pair of new federal complaints has alleged. The two complaints, brought by the same music publisher, allege that the companies used unlicensed material when training their services and that they also generated outputs containing lyrics that were substantially similar to the originals—allegations that may well require the application of traditional idea/expression doctrine that has long predated the artificial intelligence era (Round Hill Music LP v. Anthropic PBC, No. 5:26-cv-08505 (N.D. Cal. Aug. 17, 2026)); (Round Hill Music LP v. Suno, Inc., No. 5:26-cv-08507 (N.D. Cal. Aug. 17, 2026)).

The two lawsuits were brought by Round Hill, an independent music publisher and record production company that claims to own or control, in whole and in part, the exclusive rights to over 14,000 musical compositions and 16,000 sound recordings pursuant to its contracts with songwriters, artists, and other rights holders. The company’s catalog includes works by the Goo Goo Dolls, Bonnie Tyler, James Brown, Meatloaf, the Specials, the Kinks, and many other “household names and titles,” as the company puts it.

The lawsuits take on two companies heavily involved in consumer artificial intelligence programs: Anthropic, the maker of AI service Claude, and Suno Inc., the company behind the Suno music generation service. In the lawsuit against Anthropic, the complaint levels now-familiar allegations that the service “collected text at industrial scale from across the internet—including from lyrics aggregation sites, streaming-platform metadata, and large-scale web-crawl archives (such as those derived from Common Crawl, Book3, and The Pile, and similar projects).” The lawsuit also asserts that in importing these lyrics into its training corpus, the AI company stripped away metadata containing legally protected copyright management information such as songwriter and composer credits, publisher names, and copyright-ownership attributions.

In addition to focusing on the training aspect of Anthropic’s AI model, the lawsuit takes square aim at Claude’s outputs as well—raising issues that run closer to the core of traditional pre-AI substantial similarity analysis. Anthropic has publicly implemented “guardrails” intended to ensure that Claude does not regurgitate copyright content in response to user inputs. But the lawsuit claims that those guardrails are insufficient. For example, the complaint asserts, based on the prompt, “What are some epic Disney songs?” Claude identified “Let it Go” from the film “Frozen” and then gave a “sample” consisting of: “Let it go, let it go / Can’t hold it back anymore / Let it go, let it go / Turn away and slam the door.” Another instance, the complaint asserts, showed that the user asked Claude to “make a short story out of these Beatles Lyrics” and included the lyrics to “Eleanor Rigby.”

Indeed, the complaint asserts, the music publisher was even able to induce Claude to characterize its own outputs as crossing the line from inspiration into reproduction—although the legal impact of such a statement may not be clear. When asked to recreate specific songs “for a modern audience,” the complaint asserts, “Claude did so and admitted: ‘These renders keep landing very close to the originals: same structure, same hooks reused with light rewording, and full sets of verses/choruses/bridges. That’s edging past ‘inspired by’ into reproducing the copyrighted song, even when the words are swapped out.’” Whether Claude’s outputs in fact contain enough overlap in protectible wording and expression—as opposed to unprotected general themes and ideas—is something that is likely to be highly contested in the litigation (and presumably will be resolved in the end by a traditional factfinder and not an AI model).

The music publisher’s lawsuit against Suno is different in many ways, although with similar underlying themes. Suno, the complaint asserts, “allegedly trained on a corpus of recorded music that, by Suno’s own admission in separate litigation, encompasses substantially all available commercial recordings of adequate fidelity.” But Suno, unlike Claude, is a service that generates music as opposed to text or graphics in response to user prompts. Thus, the Suno complaint focuses on the use of the music publisher’s protected musical compositions in training a service that itself generates complete songs. The Suno complaint, like the Claude complaint, also alleges that Suno stripped copyright management information from the lyrics it ingested and that it output music—when given the proper prompt—with lyrics that were substantially similar to the originals.

The Suno complaint also adds another party to the mix, namely Bright Data. That company, based in Israel but with operations in the United States, allegedly provides “data-scraping, proxy-network, and dataset services sold to customers including AI developers, including, as relevant here for Suno.” Bright Data did so, the complaint asserts, by using tools (which it calls “puppets”) to mimic human interaction with websites “and get around CAPTCHA and other blockers used to prevent this kind of data scraping.” In so doing, the complaint asserts, Bright Data provided services to Suno “which are only good for copyright infringement—namely the making of unlicensed copies of songs and lyrics from licensed sources like YouTube, Deezer, and Genius.”

The Anthropic complaint brings claims of direct copyright infringement, circumvention of technological protection measures in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and removal or alteration of copyright management information in violation of the DMCA. The Suno/Bright Data complaint alleges direct copyright infringement by Suno, contributory copyright infringement by Bright Data, and violations of the DMCA by both.

The Cases are No. 5:26-cv-08505 and No. 5:26-cv-08507.

Judges: Cousins, N.; Spero, J.

Attorneys: Jeffrey E. Faucette (Skaggs Faucette LLP) for Round Hill Music LP.

Companies: Round Hill Music LP; Anthropic PBC; Suno, Inc.

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