Photo Credit: Zach M

Anthropic and Suno are aggressively pushing back against Round Hill’s attempt to relate their cases – even as the Claude developer seeks to add the former suit to a pile of industry litigation.

The high-stakes copyright confrontations’ sub-dispute surfaced in separate filings from Anthropic and Suno. As we broke down closer to August’s start, each company is facing an infringement action from Round Hill, which maintains that the defendants trained their models on protected works sans authorization and proceeded to generate infringing outputs.

Evidently looking to remain on the offensive, Round Hill promptly moved to relate (not consolidate) the cases. Without exploring the step’s potential strategic angle here, doing so would essentially streamline the multifaceted and highly expensive legal battles.

At present, major music publishers’ first and second suits against Anthropic are related alongside BMG’s distinct-but-similar Anthropic complaint. Back in April, the judge presiding over all three cases entered a 90-day stay “to promote judicial economy, conserve party resources, and facilitate coordination between the related actions,” the oldest of which has been unfolding since 2023.

And more recently, Anthropic on Tuesday formally filed to add Round Hill’s complaint to the same collection of related litigation.

“Like the Concord/BMG Actions, the Round Hill Action is a copyright case alleging that Anthropic’s Claude AI models allegedly use the text of a music publisher’s song lyrics in training data and purportedly reproduce lyrics in outputs,” the AI giant wrote in support of its argument. “The claims in the Round Hill Action are virtually identical to those in the Concord/BMG Actions.”

Apparently, though, this argument doesn’t extend to the possibility of relating Round Hill’s Suno and Anthropic suits, between which the latter defendant believes there are key differences.

“The two cases involve different defendants, different AI technologies, different alleged infringing conduct, different property, and different types of copyrights,” Anthropic indicated.

“The only common ground between these cases is that the same music company plaintiffs filed both suits on the same day. But that is not enough. The two suits involve alleged infringement of different copyrights (sound recordings versus only musical compositions), by different defendants, and by wholly different means,” the IPO-minded company continued.

Meanwhile, Suno echoed the points: “The only meaningful similarity between Anthropic and Suno is that they are both copyright infringement cases brought by the same Plaintiffs against generative AI companies who allegedly used some of the same songs as ‘training data.’

“That is insufficient to satisfy the standard for relation,” the BMG-partnered platform claimed in a filing of its own.

“The defendants across the two cases are completely different companies,” Suno continued, proceeding to emphasize that “the AI services they offer are distinct” while also stressing the existence of a contributory claim against Bright Data in the Suno case but not the Anthropic action.

“Suno also includes a cause of action not asserted in Anthropic, for contributory copyright infringement against Bright Data. This cause of action will involve separate legal and factual issues not present in Anthropic.”

Time will tell which arguments prevail and, of course, which parties emerge victorious in the showdowns themselves. Even at this relatively early stage, however, it seems safe to declare the litigants’ attorneys winners.

That the billable hours are already flying hasn’t been lost on Suno. With a goal of developing “the AI tools that will define how legal teams operate in the next decade,” the startup recently hired a former TikTok higher-up as its legal operations lead.

Additionally, the company last week quietly welcomed an ex-LegalZoom head of talent acquisition in the identical role.