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Round Hill Music LP v Anthropic PBC

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Case Information
Case name Round Hill Music LP v. Anthropic PBC[1]
Court U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California[1]
Docket 5:26-cv-08505[1]
Filed August 17, 2026[1]
Judge(s) Charles R. Breyer[2]
Plaintiffs Round Hill Music LP and five affiliated funds / holding companies[1]
Defendants Anthropic PBC[1]
Case type Civil action[1]
Claims / issues Direct copyright infringement, DMCA circumvention and CMI-removal claims involving lyrics[1]
Status Complaint filed August 17, 2026; public docket reviewed through September 3. Later developments have not been verified.[2]

Round Hill Music LP et al. v. Anthropic PBC is a federal copyright and DMCA action alleging that Anthropic copied protected song lyrics for Claude training and generated outputs derived from Round Hill compositions without authorization.[3][4]

Allegations

Round Hill alleges that it owns or controls rights in 14,364 musical compositions and 16,873 sound recordings and identifies 500 compositions as an initial bellwether set.[3] The complaint alleges that Anthropic acquired lyrics through web scraping and third-party datasets, retained works in an all-purpose repository, and copied them during data cleaning, tokenization, encoding, and successive Claude training runs.[3]

The complaint also alleges that Anthropic removed copyright management information and that Claude reproduced or closely adapted protected lyrics in response to prompts.[3] Examples in the complaint concern “Iris,” “I Got You (I Feel Good),” and “Total Eclipse of the Heart.”[3]

Claims and Relief Sought

The complaint asserts direct copyright infringement and DMCA claims for alleged circumvention of access controls and removal or alteration of copyright management information.[3]

Round Hill seeks declaratory and injunctive relief, damages or profits, statutory damages, an accounting, and impoundment or destruction of unauthorized copies allegedly retained in datasets, repositories, model weights, and server infrastructure.[3] The complaint says Round Hill may amend the case to cover 10,000 or more works and alleges that claimed statutory damages could approach or exceed $1 billion.[3][4]

Significance

The action adds a music publisher's claims to existing litigation over Anthropic's acquisition, storage, and use of copyrighted material for AI training and output generation.[3] Its request to impound model weights extends the requested remedy beyond source datasets and archived copies.[3][5]

See Also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 Court filing / case record, reviewed September 7, 2026
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Case source, reviewed September 7, 2026
  3. ↑ 3.00 3.01 3.02 3.03 3.04 3.05 3.06 3.07 3.08 3.09 Round Hill Music LP et al. v. Anthropic PBC, Complaint, No. 5:26-cv-08505 (N.D. Cal. filed August 17, 2026)
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Music Business Worldwide, “Round Hill is suing Suno and Anthropic for up to $1B apiece,” August 18, 2026
  5. ↑ Music Business Worldwide, “5 things to know about Round Hill’s Suno and Anthropic lawsuits,” August 24, 2026
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