A music publisher just told two AI companies they can’t have their “Total Eclipse of the Heart” without paying for it.
Independent music publisher Round Hill Music filed separate lawsuits against Anthropic and Suno in federal court in California on Monday, accusing the companies of using copyrighted music and lyrics without permission to train their AI systems.
Round Hill initially identified 500 compositions, including the Goo Goo Dolls’ “Iris,” Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart” and James Brown’s “I Got You (I Feel Good).”
The publisher said the lawsuits could eventually cover 10,000 or more compositions, with potential damages that could “potentially approach or conceivably exceed $1 billion,” Reuters reported.
The allegations differ by company. Round Hill claims Anthropic copied lyrics from the identified songs to train Claude, while its Suno complaint alleges that the AI music company copied compositions and recordings to train its music-generation system. The complaints also accuse the companies of storing unauthorized copies of Round Hill’s works and using scraped material without permission.
The Suno lawsuit also names data-scraping company Bright Data as a defendant, according to Music Week.
Round Hill wants a trial
Round Hill CEO Josh Gruss said the company is not opposed to AI but objects to businesses being built from creative works without compensating their owners.
“We are not against artificial intelligence. We are against the idea that you can build a business worth billions on top of other people’s creative work and pay the creators nothing,” Gruss said in a statement cited by Variety.
More importantly, Round Hill says it does not intend to settle simply for a licensing arrangement.
“We intend to take these cases to trial and to hold these companies accountable, and we will not accept a resolution that leaves songwriters and artists deprived of their rightful share of compensation,” Gruss said, per Reuters.
That stance sets the cases apart from several recent music-industry disputes. Warner Music Group settled its lawsuit against Suno last year with a licensing agreement, while Suno recently announced a global partnership with BMG.
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Another test for AI fair use
The lawsuits add to a growing legal fight over whether companies can use copyrighted works to train AI without obtaining licenses.
AI companies have argued that training transforms existing works into new technology and can qualify as fair use. Copyright owners, meanwhile, say that using their work without permission takes value from the creators who produced it.
That dispute now spans books, news, visual art and music. Anthropic has already faced several copyright cases involving song lyrics, while Suno is separately being sued by Universal Music Group and Sony Music.
Read more: As music companies pursue legal action over AI training, Sony is developing technology that could trace AI-generated songs back to copyrighted source material and make disputed musical influence easier to measure.