Round Hill sued Suno and Anthropic, and this time the scraping company got named too

Round Hill Music filed two copyright infringement complaints on August 17, one against Suno and one against Anthropic, and told the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California that damages in each case could “conceivably exceed $1 billion.” Both are represented by Richard S. Busch, and Digital Music News first reported the filings the same day.

Most of what Round Hill argues will be familiar to anyone who has followed the last two years of AI litigation. One part is not. The Suno complaint also names Bright Data, the Netanya company that sells the proxy networks and web scrapers Round Hill says made the scraping possible in the first place.

Why naming Bright Data changes the shape of an AI music lawsuit

Every previous case in this space has pointed at the company that trained the model. Round Hill is pointing one step further back, at the vendor that supplied the shovels, and it wants the court to treat that supply as contributory infringement rather than as a neutral toolmaker selling to whoever shows up.

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Bright Data's tools are specifically designed to scrape music files en masse and strip them of CMI and otherwise prepare them to train AI Models.

The complaint goes on to argue those tools breach the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s anti-circumvention and CMI-removal provisions, and it puts a number on the business built around them: more than $300 million in 2025 revenue, roughly 50% year-on-year growth, and a projected $400 million in annual recurring revenue for 2026. X made a similar argument in 2023 when it accused Bright Data of building a data-scraping business on the backs of other technology companies.

Round Hill is also more specific than earlier plaintiffs about method. Rather than describing scraping in general terms, it claims Suno circumvented a named list of protections to reach the audio:

• Authentication gates
• Subscription paywalls
• Rate limiting
• CAPTCHA challenges
• robots.txt access restrictions

Music Ally reports the sources named are YouTube, Deezer and Genius. Round Hill further alleges Suno removed copyright management information and trained the models to disregard CMI in both training and output, which would make the concealment part of the system rather than a side effect of it.

What Round Hill wants from Anthropic that the earlier publisher cases did not get

The Anthropic complaint takes aim at something Anthropic has spent two years pointing to as evidence of good faith, which is the guardrails bolted onto Claude after the first wave of publisher litigation. Round Hill’s position is that the filters did not work well enough to matter.

“Despite implementing partial output filters in response to prior litigation,” the complaint reads, “Anthropic has failed to prevent Claude from reproducing the vast majority of Round Hill’s catalog. Anthropic’s continued operation of Claude with knowledge that it generates infringing outputs constitutes willful infringement.”

That framing matters because willfulness is what lifts statutory damages, and it turns a partial fix into evidence of knowledge rather than evidence of care. It also runs alongside the direct infringement claims Concord and BMG are already pressing, so Anthropic now faces the same argument from more than one direction.

On fair use, where AI developers have had real success in the past, Round Hill is not hedging. It describes a permanent stockpile of copyrighted material whose exploitation “fails every factor of the fair-use analysis: the purpose is acquisitive rather than transformative; entire works are retained without limitation; and the unauthorized copies function as market substitutes, displacing sales and licenses on a one-to-one basis.”

The timing is hard to miss. Round Hill filed three days after Jamendo and The American Dollar quietly dismissed their own Suno complaints, and a few weeks after GEMA won its case against Suno in Munich. Suno declined to comment on the complaint, and Anthropic did not respond before Digital Music News published.