Round Hill Music LP v. Anthropic PBC, No. 5:26-cv-08505, is a copyright infringement action filed on August 17, 2026 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California by the independent music publisher Round Hill Music and five affiliated funds against Anthropic. It is assigned to District Judge Charles R. Breyer, brought under 17 U.S.C. § 101 with nature of suit 820 (copyright), and carries a plaintiff jury demand (Source: courtlistener.com).
Round Hill filed a second, separate action against Suno and the data-collection company Bright Data the same day before a different judge (Round Hill Music v. Suno). Contemporaneous coverage described the filings as a single suit against both companies.
Infobox
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Plaintiffs | Round Hill Music LP; Round Hill Music Royalty Fund II, LP; Round Hill Music Royalty Fund III, LP; Round Hill Royalty Fund III Plus, LP; RH Carlin Holdings LLC; GFP Co-Invest, LP |
| Defendant | Anthropic PBC |
| Court | U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, No. 5:26-cv-08505 |
| Judge | Charles R. Breyer (District Judge) |
| Filed | August 17, 2026 |
| Cause | 17 U.S.C. § 101 — copyright infringement |
| Nature of suit | 820 (Copyright) |
| Jury demand | Plaintiff |
| Plaintiffs' counsel | Richard S. Busch (Adams & Reese LLP, Nashville); Jeffrey E. Faucette (Skaggs Faucette LLP) |
| Defence counsel | Sonal N. Mehta, Louis W. Tompros, Ari Holtzblatt, Alex W. Miller (Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP); Andrew M. Gass (Latham & Watkins) |
Background
The action is the second publisher suit against Anthropic over musical works held in the record here. Universal Music Publishing Group, Concord and ABKCO sued Anthropic in the Middle District of Tennessee in 2023 over song-lyric reproduction, a case transferred to the Northern District of California and docketed as Concord Music Group, Inc. v. Anthropic PBC, No. 5:24-cv-03811; a further publisher action is tracked at Sony Music Publishing v. Anthropic. Anthropic also defends the authors' class action Bartz v. Anthropic over book training data (Source: courtlistener.com).
Round Hill's chief executive, Josh Gruss, framed the filings in terms of licensing: "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. Licensing isn't an obstacle to innovation – it is there to protect the legal owners of the raw material, their property" (Source: variety.com).
Claims
Round Hill alleges that its compositions were scraped without permission and used to train generative models. Variety reported that the complaint lists 500 songs said to have been part of the scraping, with a stated intention to amend to reflect at least 10,000 songs, and that Round Hill wrote that such violations would demand damages in the "hundreds of millions of dollars and may ultimately approach or exceed $1 billion" (Source: variety.com). That figure is a projected range stated in the complaint rather than a fixed sum demanded, and the coverage does not apportion it between the two actions.
Procedural history
The complaint was filed August 17, 2026 and assigned to Judge Charles R. Breyer, who also presides over In Re Mosaic LLM Litigation, No. 3:24-cv-01451. Anthropic's copyright defence teams from WilmerHale and Latham & Watkins have appeared on the docket. Variety published its account on August 18, 2026. No terminating event is recorded (Source: courtlistener.com; variety.com).
The docket's party list as retrieved also names Suno, Inc. Whether Suno is a co-defendant in this action, or the entry reflects the relationship between the two same-day filings, is not established from the docket metadata alone.
Open questions
- Whether Suno is a party to this action, as the retrieved party list suggests, or whether the entry reflects the companion filing.
- What Round Hill alleges Anthropic specifically did, as distinct from Suno — the coverage treats the two defendants together and the complaint has not been retrieved.
- Whether the promised amendment expanding the asserted works from 500 to at least 10,000 has been filed.
- Whether the case is related to or consolidated with Concord Music Group v. Anthropic, which is before a different judge in the same district.
Relationships
- instance-of: AI Copyright — a training-data infringement claim over musical compositions
- related: Round Hill Music v. Suno — companion action filed the same day by the same plaintiffs
- related: Sony Music Publishing v. Anthropic — the other publisher action against the same defendant
- related: Bartz v. Anthropic — the authors' training-data action against the same defendant
- litigates: Anthropic — defendant
- depends-on: AI Copyright Litigation — Analysis — one of the actions compared there
- related: AI Music Generation — the subject matter of the asserted works