Nat Rubio-Licht

AI can make a Taylor Swift song. Or a Fleetwood Mac song. Or a Frank Sinatra song. Now, musicians and listeners alike are starting to think outside of AI's black box.

More than ever, music is veering into the unexpected, whether it be leaning into sour notes, playing non-traditional melodies against odd time signatures, or creating entirely new genres like Celtic EDM. These new sounds serve as evidence of humanity: Something so strange, interesting, or thoughtful could have only come from the mind of a living, breathing human.

It's a sign that AI's ability to create polished music isn't just changing the music industry. It's changing the sound of music itself. The result? Imperfections have become a badge of honor.

"Even coming from a pre-AI era, we can make music perfect," David Das, vice president of the Society of Composers and Lyricists, told The Deep View. "We can beat perfect drums, we can tune vocals, we can make everything sound like it was made by a computer. But AI, in its current incarnation, seems to take [it] even further than that."

The birth of a new sound

One of the most common complaints about AI-generated music is that it lacks grit.

It's why Cecil Coleman, a drummer in Australian band Body Type, has seen a pivot toward imperfect playing as fellow musicians get frustrated with how overly-clean AI sounds. There’s a general consensus that AI-generated music tends to sound overproduced and too polished, she said. "A lot of the artists I really love, I've seen them doing more of this earthy, gritty type of vibe to distinguish [themselves]."

In Das's writing and composing, he is leaning into raw sounds and flaws, recording without click tracks and samples as a form of psychological rebellion against pristine music. "I'm in a phase of my life [where] I just want [music] to feel human again."

So why does AI-generated music sound so perfect? Robert Rowe, a New York University professor who teaches about music innovation, told The Deep View that while AI outputs often sound "believable," they face core problems due to the way large language models are constructed. They are built to predict the next letters rather than make an entire, cohesive piece.

"It sounds good locally, from phrase to phrase, and then over the course of an entire song, it is kind of laughable. It just doesn't make any sense, or it repeats in weird ways, or sounds too much like something else," said Rowe.

This could be attributed to "autophagy" in machine learning, or when these models are trained on machine-generated data that creates a feedback loop, Carmine-Emanuele Cella, a composer, professor and co-director of UC Berkeley’s Center for New Music and Audio Technologies, told The Deep View. When AI consumes the data that it generates, the models end up creating "all sorts of unique patterns and repetitions and things that you are, in fact, able to recognize in the same way you would recognize a text generated by AI."

This results in common tells that listeners often point out, he said, such as over-repetition in lyrics, choruses, and harmonic sequences. And according to recording engineer Liam Weiland, AI-generated music has another giveaway: a "high-end hiss." Still, the average listener doesn't tend to notice—or if they do, they might not think about why it’s there. And with AI production constantly improving, Weiland said, these indicators might not be around for long.

Additionally, AI may have a similar impact on music as photography had on painting.

While the birth of photography in the 19th century initially made painters fear that their occupation would become obsolete, what resulted were new styles of painting that went beyond the confines of realism, leading to the birth of impressionism and abstract art. Meanwhile, photography itself became an artistic medium.

AI could create a "new paradigm" for both listeners and musicians, said Das, where both AI-generated music and counter-AI genres gain traction. "I think it'll go in both directions," he said.

Robert Prey, professor of digital culture at Oxford University, told the Deep View that AI could essentially be a forcing function that drives musicians to become more creative. For instance, if AI can create polished, pleasant enough melodies, "then perhaps we don't need musicians to do that. Maybe musicians can move into a more creative realm. They may be enticed to experiment more, rather than write the standard four-chord pop song."

While some artists are leaning into grit, imperfections, and weirdness as a means of rebelling against the new wave of technology, one genre in particular has taken to it: electronic music.

• Diplo, for instance, has unabashedly embraced the tech, urging musicians to either adapt to AI or "just give up and become an Uber driver" in a podcast in April, noting that AI can give him "the best voice" and that he doesn't need anyone to sing anymore.
• In an interview with Billboard, Steve Aoki said that he uses AI for lyric generation, and that even though he's a "novice" in the tech, fellow musicians should "ride the wave."
• As early as 2023, David Guetta said that AI is the future of music after using the tech to create lyrics and rap in the vocal style of Eminem for a song.
• And DJ and producer Josh Fawaz saw an AI cover of Madonna's "Like a Prayer" amass millions of streams and top the charts, though he has faced intense backlash for openly embracing Suno.

DJs and electronic music producers tend to embrace this tech more openly due to the nature of the music itself, Seth Forsgren, co-founder and head of product for Google Flow Music, the company's AI music and production tool, told The Deep View. Just as developers were the first frontier for AI adoption in the enterprise due to their technical prowess, electronic music artists tend to be more technically-inclined than others. For instance, Forsgren said that some of the most avid users of Flow Music fall in this genre.

"These are artists who are deep on their computer and doing amazing, crazy stuff with their tools already," said Forsgren. "So the idea of having a new way to create sounds out of nothing is inherently approachable and exciting to that audience."

But beyond musicians adopting the tech, AI has the capability to shift the boundaries between musician and consumer entirely, said Forsgren. AI could create a world in which a piece of music is a building block for the consumer to reimagine, rather than a "static piece that doesn't change." The key piece, he said, is that the artist has to want their work to be something malleable that listeners can reference and "take actions on top of."

"I think for the artists who want to, and people who are excited to have their music out in the world and have it be a living being," said Forsgren. "Having fans interact with that, have them engage with it, have them be a part of changing it. It is just like a really novel new thing."

The way music is taught

This changing landscape is something that music educators, especially those with a focus in production, are exploring with their students. At NYU, Rowe approaches his class "Music, the Mind, and Artificial Intelligence," geared toward non-music majors, as an exploration of AI as a tool, not a replacement for creativity.

"We approach it from user cognition," said Rowe. "What happens to us when we're producing or listening to music? How do we as humans process it? And then we go through the history of AI more generally, leading up to the current state of affairs: large language models, and so forth."

Meanwhile, both UC Berkeley’s Center for New Music and Audio Technologies and The Berklee College of Music's Emerging Artistic Technology Lab are addressing this pivot.

"I am redesigning the pedagogy in a way that is more about creating creative coding for music, where the focus is not about developing neural networks, but is about understanding the behaviors of these neural networks and understanding how you find the space where these interact with music making or music composition or performance at large," Cella said.

Jonathan Wyner, the head of artistic technology initiatives for Berklee's tech lab, wants to introduce students to new technology in part because it’s where opportunity lives.

"We feel a sense of responsibility to provide access to tools and to help the students understand what it means to go out into the world where these tools exist and make smart decisions for themselves about how, when, and where to engage with them," he told The Deep View.

Wyner advocates for "the creative position" within AI music companies like Suno and Moises, acknowledging those organizations are technical in nature. Having those roles allows generation tools to produce "the best sound possible," he said. "I believe that great sound is important, both from the standpoint of expression and also the standpoint of culture."

In his position, he can influence the systems, ensuring they’re useful for musicians. "The ones that we learn from as we interact with them, and they help us get better at our craft, as opposed to systems that simply automate all the decisions and remove decisions and control from the user."

Advocacy is an ongoing effort in the ideal partnership between AI music companies and musicians. Wyner hopes "that as students figure out where the technology is useful or not useful, that that becomes a force for putting pressure on the developers to make tools better, so they actually work for musicians."

Why listeners are getting weird

But AI isn't just changing the way that music is being made. It's changing the things that listeners want to hear. And in the face of ultra-polished, pitch perfect AI-generated music, consumers, too, are leaning into weird.

Let's take the masked Canadian fusion band, Angine de Poitrine, as an example. The duo, which dresses up in fantastical alien-like masks for their performances, skyrocketed into the public eye earlier this year after publishing a 28-minute live set on YouTube that went viral, scoring 18 million views since it was posted in February by the KEXP radio station.

The band is the definition of outlandish, both in their use of complex time signatures, microtonal scales and unpredictable, progressive-rock melody patterns, and in the genre-bending way they define themselves: as a pair of "space-time voyagers" in a "mantra-rock, Dadaist, Pythagorean-Cubist orchestra."

It is true that weird things often catch the eye of the consumer. If you're scrolling on your Instagram or TikTok feed and you come across a polka dot-clad band that's playing music that sounds like aliens trying to emulate human music, you're probably going to stop and listen. Though Angine de Poitrine and the "math rock" genre has generally preceded the age of AI, the recent reverence for this band goes beyond just the simple fact that they are doing something unique: Many listeners see this kind of music as everything that AI isn't.

And it's evidenced by some of the comments under their viral radio set. One commenter wrote "I showed this to an AI and it factory reset itself out of fear." Another, meanwhile, said that "this is 100% why AI can't and shouldn't replace human art and creativity." And another wrote that "the sophistication of this band is what makes me have faith in humanity. AI can’t beat or replicate this kind of artistic output."

The success of Angine de Poitrine may be a harbinger. "I don't know exactly how music will change, but I do think what musicians will start doing will be one step ahead of [what] the generative models that can replicate," Geraldo Ramos, CEO of AI music production firm Moises, told The Deep View.

It's not just whimsical and outlandish sounds that consumers are leaning into, said Das. It's imperfections. More than ever, listeners are craving mistakes in their music, he said. Things like sour notes, off-rhythm playing, or vocal cracks are the things that distinguish human-generated music from its AI counterpart.

"Where we are in 2026, the knock on AI music seems to be generally that it sounds too perfect," Das added. "People think they can identify AI tracks because it's just beyond what's perfect. I can see that there could be enough of a backlash to this movement where people just crave the real thing."

Naturally, the desire for organic sound could lead to a surging interest in live music, said Ramos. Being able to play an instrument live at all will become "way more valuable as more music becomes AI," he said. Fans will want to see their favorite musicians with their fingers on keys and strings, to hear their voices shift and crack in ways that AI doesn't emulate.

And artists, too, want to show off their capabilities—even those in genres that don't always lend themselves to raw, live performances using instruments.

It's why Armin Van Buuren, a Dutch Grammy-nominated DJ, recorded one of his electronic albums as a live piano performance. "That's the reason why I want to sit behind the piano and play," he told The Deep View. "So you can see what I'm doing is real, there's a chance for mistakes, every piano performance is different, there's a beauty to it."

The blurring lines

What consumers dislike more than AI-generated music, however, is being tricked by it.

For instance, in November, the song "I Run" by HAVEN achieved virality well before listeners realized that the song's producers used Suno to transform Harrison Walker’s vocals into a feminine voice. The backlash led to the song being banned from streaming services entirely. Meanwhile, a band called The Velvet Sundown, garnered over a million listeners across streaming platforms before admitting it was "a synthetic music project guided by human creative direction," much to the dismay of fans.

Tired of being misled, many are now dedicated to sniffing out AI bands. One TikTok account by the band Pawns or Kings has an entire series dedicated to investigating: "Is this band real or AI?"'

"There are few people who would actually say AI-generated music is bad, but I think we live in a world where there's people who want to reward an artist that they like, not just because they like their music, but because they like the person," Mike Pappas, CEO of Modulate, a company that has created AI music and deepfake detection software, told The Deep View.

Though listeners are actively searching for imperfect sound, at first blush, the vast majority aren't actually able to tell the difference. A November study from music streaming service Deezer and market research firm Ipsos found that, of 9,000 people from eight different countries, 97% couldn't tell the difference between fully AI-generated music and human-created music. Around 71% of respondents were surprised by these results, and more than half, 52%, said they were uncomfortable not being able to tell the difference. Around 45% said they would like the option to filter out 100% AI-generated music from their streaming platforms.

There are a number of efforts to increase transparency between what is and isn't AI-generated for listeners. The most prominent of those efforts is digital watermarking, such as with Google DeepMind's SynthID, Jeff Chang, director of product management at Google DeepMind, told The Deep View. The SynthID watermark is one of the most widely-adopted standards for detecting AI-generated content, adopted by labs OpenAI, Anthropic and ElevenLabs.

"We're pretty proud of the SynthID standard that we've been evangelizing," said Chang. "We want to encourage a whole ecosystem to be transparent about this stuff, and so SynthID is our way of doing that, and we're glad that other parts of the ecosystem are signing up for that now too."

However, because not every music generation model abides by SynthID standards, Modulate has created a different solution, said Pappas. In July, the company released an API for detecting AI-generated music without relying on picking out watermarks. The company's tool is 95% accurate, and detects AI in the specifics of the music itself. Pappas said that makes its tech "a lot more resilient as a new model comes out every single day," he said. "There's always a way to just work around that watermark."

But with constantly shifting ethical boundaries on where AI should or shouldn't belong in music, Modulate drew its own line in the sand: The company detects specifically whether vocals or instrumentals were synthesized by an AI model, rather than flagging if something was merely digitally altered, Pappas said.

"We're trying to draw a line around: 'did a human actually perform this in some fashion, or was it completely manifested out of AI?'" Pappas said.

The cultural shift

Pappas has a point: The boundaries of where AI does and doesn't belong in music are constantly changing. And that means that the nature of music itself, both for its creators and consumers, is bound to change with it.

Something we shouldn't forget, however, is that this is the nature of how technology and music have always interacted. Things like synthesizers, autotune, sample libraries and more created new sounds that weren't even conceivable before their invention. As Prey put it, "The music industry is one of the most interesting industries to look at, because it's constantly adapting to new technologies."

Though the ethical lines are still being navigated, AI may have the same effect, supercharging the most creative artists among us to create new types of music that weren't previously conceivable. It may also light a fire that fuels human creativity as counter culture, influencing musicians to create sounds that may be outside of their comfort zone.

That, at least, would be the best case scenario. The reality, like all things that AI touches, lies somewhere in the middle: Between the death of the arts and an entirely new era of inconceivable creativity.

Anthropic has unveiled its answer to the growing frenzy around personal AI agents.

On Wednesday, the AI lab announced Claude Duet, an app that allows the company's flagship chatbot to work as a "proactive agent," available in research preview by waitlist for Pro and Max subscribers. The company said that Duet is built for professionals and small business owners with "more on their plates than they can track."

Anthropic said that Duet will complete tasks when directed, keep working when users step away, keep track of tasks that require user attention, and check with a user prior to acting on their behalf. The agent is designed around Claude Opus 5.5, the most powerful model in its Opus lineup.

• Duet will send a short brief to users each morning with the most important tasks or information across a user's connected Claude apps, and keeps tabs on those apps throughout the day. However, it will only reach out if something requires a user's attention.
• The company said the agent can handle a large range of tasks, both simple and complex, from scheduling meetings to building dashboards or developing financial forecasts.
• User context from Claude is the foundation of Duet, carrying over memory, skills and connected apps from a user's existing account. Duet can work with the more than 6,000 plug-ins in the Claude Marketplace, including Gmail, Slack, QuickBooks, Stripe, Canva, Shopify and more.

Addressing safety, Duet is built on the company's framework for trustworthy agents, which also is the base of Claude Code and Claude in Chrome. The agent also never sees user passwords or sign-in tokens, defends against prompt injection attacks, and approves actions through its "auto mode classifier," which prevents it from taking actions that a user didn't request. Duet also includes its own dedicated classifier and safety system that checks messages and guards against sensitive information leaks.

Duet adds to a growing pool of options for personal AI agents. At rival OpenAI's Dev Day in late September, the lab unveiled its addition to this trend with Dots, an always-on agent with its own cloud computer that similarly works across users' connected apps. Meta's version of this is Muse, the agentic app the company launched at its Meta Connect event in September that has since faced backlash over data privacy concerns.

Our Deeper View

Once OpenAI unveiled Dots, It was only a matter of time before Anthropic came to the table with its own take on the personal, always-on agent. Though OpenAI got to it first, that doesn't necessarily mean that the first-mover advantage will go far in winning over users. In fact, because users are largely comfortable switching between models or leveraging both as they become commoditized, it's likely that both Dots and Duet will have a place in professional workflows. It's something that even OpenAI's Thibault “Tibo” Sottiaux acknowledged in a post on X on Wednesday, saying "Dot, meet Duet. Duet, meet Dot. Be nice to each other." Together, however, these innovations signal a bigger shift towards seamless, easy-to-use agents that operate across a user's context and can be integrated into workflows straight off the shelf.

OpenAI agents may have dug up one of the most widespread cyber vulnerabilities yet.

On Wednesday, the AI lab revealed that a group of researchers and security experts used GPT-5.6 Sol to identify critical vulnerabilities in PHP, an open-source programming language that is used by an estimated 70% of all websites where server-side language can be identified. OpenAI called the flaws "one of the most impactful vulnerabilities in recent memory," highlighting that AI can be used to uncover internet-scale vulnerabilities that can arm both defenders and attackers.

"To our knowledge, frontier AI found these vulnerabilities before attackers did, opening a Defender’s Window for maintainers and security providers to prepare fixes and protections ahead of disclosure," OpenAI said in its post.

The vulnerabilities, called CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, could enable hackers to remotely execute code on servers and gain access to sensitive data. OpenAI said it spent two months coordinating with maintainers of PHP, as well as Wiz, Cloudflare and government agencies to develop patches as part of its Patch the Planet initiative, before disclosing the vulnerabilities.

PHP today released security patches for the vulnerabilities, noting that all users are "strongly encouraged to update immediately." In a post on X, the FBI Cyber Division urged organizations to immediately update the impacted PHP systems, or to take their systems offline if they cannot be patched quickly. Additionally, the agency warned organizations to monitor their servers for suspicious activity, and if they discover that their systems have been compromised, report it to their local FBI field office.

This incident underscores that AI is completely shifting what we consider to be exploitable, said Ismael Valenzuela, vice president of labs, threat research and intelligence at Arctic Wolf. Some vulnerabilities existed for longer than a decade, he said, living inside common applications like WordPress, WooCommerce and Magento. "What changed wasn’t the underlying code, but the ability to find those weaknesses and turn them into working exploits," he said.

And while this vulnerability impacts a large swathe of the internet, it's only the "tip of the iceberg," Danny Jenkins, CEO of ThreatLocker, told The Deep View's Jason Hiner. Vulnerability discovery is already accelerating, he noted, with nearly 38,000 cybersecurity vulnerabilities published through the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures program, or CVE, in the third quarter of this year, up 81% from the previous quarter.

"We're going to see more and more of it, and more and more sites are going to be exploited," said Jenkins. "VPNs are going to be exploited. And I don't think it's stopping. I think it's accelerating, and will accelerate for at least two to three more years."

Our Deeper View

Discoveries like this are exactly why AI is a double-edged sword. The tech can be used as ammo both for security defenders and for threat actors, and the reality is that most organizations are woefully underprepared for the new reality. This is merely an example of just how large the threat surface is, and is precisely why security-by-obscurity, or just assuming your organization won't get targeted because it's obscure, is no longer an option when AI can automate not only vulnerability discovery, but exploits as well. It's also why access to these powerful models and the pace of development needs to be reigned in. Though OpenAI and Anthropic are trying their best to keep their most powerful systems under wraps, they are still largely forging ahead with frontier models, delivering several new and powerful updates to their flagship AI in recent months. But when every tool can be turned into a weapon, the onus is on the labs to prepare the world for the consequences of what their technology can unleash.

One mistake may have gotten Amazon researchers a step closer to self-improving AI.

On Tuesday, Amazon unveiled Kiro-trace, an internal tracing system that improves Kiro, Amazon's AI coding agent, from its own runs. Put simply, this system sifts through Kiro's previous work to find mistakes or wasted effort and proposes changes, then tests whether those changes actually improved the coding agent.

The idea originated from a mistake in Kiro's file-read and search tool, in which one incorrect description resulted in more than 61,000 errors. Though these errors were inconsequential, as they didn't cause anything to break down, because they didn't cause any larger problems, they likely would have gone undetected. Kiro-trace, however, spotted the error and removed it.

The researchers claim that Kiro needed to solve four problems simultaneously: Find problems that are worth fixing; create a solution that won't cause cascading errors in other places; make the solution general rather than "tuned to a benchmark;" and finally prove that the change actually worked.

Additionally, Amazon's researchers found a solution to a common problem in self-improving AI: Separating the system that's proposing the change from the system that's judging its efficacy.

• The tracing system will find problems in Kiro's runs, propose changes one at a time, and only keep changes when a separate "deterministic check" proves it's a good change. After that, the change is sent to a human reviewer who approves it.
• Most Kiro-trace change candidates don't actually make it to a human reviewer before the deterministic test rejects it, the research notes. "The ones that do are the changes that can meaningfully improve the developer experience," the company said.
• And it's already starting to show results: In the first week of operation, Kiro-trace opened eight changes to the agent, seven of which shipped. One of those changes improved the agent's ability to perform long tasks from 82% to 92%.

"When the same model proposes a change and scores it, it can optimize for its own score system, instead of the real goal, and the system drifts without anyone seeing it," Shweta Garg, applied science lead for Kiro at AWS, told The Deep View. "Kiro-trace is built around keeping those two jobs apart. The part that proposes a change never decides whether it worked. That decision runs in deterministic code the model cannot reach."

The result for the Kiro user is an agent that simply works better, the researchers said. For instance, users can expect fewer wasted calls, more careful task delegation, and better tracking of long context conversations.

Our Deeper View

The conversation around recursive self-improvement is often paired with a growing fear of a loss of control, begging the question: If AI is capable of endlessly improving itself, will it eventually grow so advanced that humans cannot understand it? But Amazon's research may suggest a way to develop self-improving AI while mitigating that fear. By keeping humans in the loop and separating the checks and balances from a system that may be incentivized to improve in nonoptimal ways, we are automatically putting a harness on the system before we arrive at a point where it's too late to control it.

As China continues to dominate the open AI ecosystem, competition between the country's labs is growing more heated.

On Monday, Chinese AI lab MiniMax launched an updated version of M3.1 Flash, its latest model which it claims delivers a "generational leap" in agentic tasks, coding, computer use and cybersecurity tasks. The multimodal model, codenamed "space bunny," also features a one million token context window, speeds up online inference threefold and is 70% cheaper than its previous iteration.

In its announcement, the company said that M3.1 Flash "represents our ongoing exploration of the balance between efficiency and capability."

The company claims that M3.1 Flash sweeps the board in a number of benchmarks, including for software engineering, reasoning, long-running tasks, coding and more, outperforming both Chinese competitors like DeepSeek, Moonshot's Kimi, and Z.ai's GLM. Minimax also claims its models outperform OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol and Anthropic's Opus 5 in the same metrics.

Additionally, the company claims its model is one of the most cost-effective on the market, running at 15 cents per million input tokens, 60 cents per million output tokens and less than 2 cents per million cached input tokens. For reference, that's a fraction of the price that model providers like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google are selling even their most affordable models for.

However, Minimax isn't the only Chinese lab gaining recognition in recent days. Last week, DeepSeek released V4.1-Flash-1017, its latest model that similarly sports faster task completion, strong performance across benchmarks and improved costs. The model is a refresh of a DeepSeek model that was initially launched in September. Over the weekend, DeepSeek's model snagged the top score on Code Arena's WebDev leaderboard for open models, and 12th place for overall models. Additionally, leaderboards from Artificial Analysis show DeepSeek's model outperforming MiniMax M3.1-Flash in some benchmarks.

Our Deeper View

Open models could completely shift the economics of AI, offering an attractive price point to developers and enterprises that are quickly growing fatigued of the price tags that frontier labs are charging for their proprietary APIs. Updates like these prove that open models are quickly closing the performance gap with their proprietary, closed-source counterparts. While some of this development is happening in the US, such as Nvidia's Nemotron models, Reflection's Beam, and Meta's recent release of Muse Spark Open, the vast majority of open source AI innovation is concentrated in Chinese firms. And the models that these labs put out come with a few caveats, including thinner safety and security measures and accusations of model distillation.

Microsoft is making its way back into the frontier model race.

On Thursday, the company's AI research lab announced it had completed pretraining on MAI-Base-2, a mixture-of-experts foundation model with 2.8 trillion parameters and 80 billion active. Additionally, the model outperforms a number of open-weight models on several evaluations, and is far more efficient than the most powerful open model it was tested against, DeepSeek-V4-Pro-Base.

The company tested the model on "held out" evaluations, meaning it was tested on a subset of data that was excluded from the training process, in subjects such as coding, math, STEM, and question answering.

• Though it didn't test against models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google or other frontier labs, MAI-Base-2 beat out trillion-plus parameter models from Alibaba, DeepSeek, Moonshot, and Xiaomi in these metrics.
• As for efficiency, the company said its model is four to 12 times more "Pre-training FLOPs-efficient" than DeepSeek's model, meaning that it used far less raw computation for internal training to achieve similar performance, largely as a result of better training data and changes to model architecture. Microsoft said it directed this cost savings into a larger model.

"Owning our model pipeline end-to-end allows Microsoft to make a distinctive offering to our customers," Microsoft said in its research blog. "Microsoft has strong data provenance over training tokens that go into our model. Our pre-training is built on organic data which does not involve distillation from other models."

Though Microsoft's AI strategy has differed from competitors like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, according to Business Insider, Microsoft AI Chief Mustafa Suleyman told employees in a town hall on Thursday that the company's unnamed in-house "pretrained base model" performed better than a OpenAI's GPT 5.6 Sol on private testing, and used "one-quarter of the compute" to achieve that result.

Our Deeper View

Microsoft has taken a unique strategy in the AI race compared to its frontier lab competitors. Rather than diverting tons of resources and energy to fighting for more powerful AI and more attention against major model providers, it's taken a more conservative approach, focusing on safety, security, and efficiency over brute-force scaling. It's a prudent strategy that's evident in the essays from both Suleyman and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, calling for caution around things like model observability and AI consciousness. It's also evident in the company's prior model releases themselves, which are focused largely on cost and resource efficiency that pass savings down to the enterprises that use them. MAI-Base-2, while certainly closer to a frontier model in size than those it's released in recent months, is another example of the company putting efficiency first, and highlights that Microsoft has its finger on the pulse of the things that are most important to its enterprise customer base: Security and cost savings.

As calls for safety standards and independent audits of AI models continue to mount, Anthropic has revealed its plan to open the door to a third party.

On Thursday, the AI lab announced that it will give "employee-like access" to a six-person team from METR, a nonprofit that evaluates frontier model risks, allowing them access to company hardware, office space, and internal tools. The company said that METR will publish the results of its risk assessments, and it has worked with the nonprofit on previous reviews of its own risk reports.

Anthropic noted that it's employees can share any information they would like with this team, other than a few specific categories, which include data about customers, attorney-client privileged information, or information about it's model architectures.

"Embedded evaluation gives a few qualified people working under Anthropic’s security standards a close view of how we operate," the company said in its blog post. "It’s not a way for other organizations to obtain our information, or that of our customers and partners."

The announcement follows Anthropic committing to third-party evaluations of its models in CEO Dario Amodei's latest essay, titled We Must Pace the Frontier, as well as signing the White House Accord on Super Intelligence, a good-faith agreement which recommended a multi-layered approach to external audits.

Anthropic also laid out its approach to working with these auditors, noting that it's giving them "deep access" to information to "share evidence and reasoned conclusions" about model risks. The company said that these evaluators require four things:

• Frontier model capability expertise, such as the ability to identify when an evaluation goes wrong;
• Financial and operational independence from the company that its evaluating;
• "Enough access" to evaluate risk, including both the model itself and how the models were trained;
• And the freedom to publish their observations and assessments.

"We want to be publicly accountable for the decisions we’re making," Anthropic said in its blog post. "But we can’t publicly share all the information relevant to our safety work. Some of it could be useful to malicious actors, or is commercially sensitive, like compute or training information."

Though rival OpenAI has not yet announced that it is giving a similar level of access to embedded evaluators, the company does already work with METR and other independent evaluators.

Anthropic's announcement, however, also follows a Tuesday report from Reuters claiming that Anthropic and OpenAI are attempting to gain control over what evaluators can publish as a means of preventing IP exposure, potentially limiting the transparency of these evaluations.

Our Deeper View

Third-party evaluations are a crucial way to hold these labs accountable for the risks that their models present. But the effectiveness of these evaluators may only go so far. For one, if they are restricted in what they can publish, as the Reuters report suggests, then they aren't able to be fully transparent to the public. Additionally, because the existing standards and "morally binding" commitments are all practically based on the honor system, whether or not these labs will take the findings of the evaluators to heart is entirely up to the labs themselves. Though voluntary measures such as this are a positive step in the right direction for AI safety, real safety measures may require firmer, mandatory regulation that requires these companies to make changes when a risk is presented.

The music industry is facing its own Turing test.

While practically every field is reckoning with how to navigate AI's impending transformation, the music industry sits at a unique crossroads: When a creation that we once believed to be distinctly human can be automated, what happens to the artist?

The question about where AI fits into the music industry has evolved from debate into a cacophony. While the loudest voices are aggressively for it or against it, the reality of how musicians are using AI and the tech's risks are far more nuanced, according to a variety of experts we interviewed. The lines they’re drawing around how it should and shouldn't be used reveal a constantly moving target.

"The dominant discourse is one of disruption—that AI is going to radically disrupt the industry," Robert Prey, professor of digital culture at Oxford University, told the Deep View. "You'll hear everything from, 'AI-generated artists are going to replace all human-generated music' to 'everybody can be a musician,' and 'it democratizes creativity.' There's both optimistic and very pessimistic versions of this disruption narrative."

How AI runs the gamut

AI can appear in music in many ways. While some camps use AI like a smarter version of Clippy, asking it to "find these drums" or "clean up these vocals," others turn to platforms like Suno and Udio to generate music from the ground up, whether it’s specific segments, reimaginations, or creating an entire song from a prompt.

Liam Weiland, a freelance recording engineer in Los Angeles, has worked on songs entirely made with AI, as well as others that used it more selectively, such as ones "where the beat stayed AI, but then we redid all the vocals and wrote a different song on top."

Even though platforms can fully generate songs, they aren’t necessarily primed to produce the final product. David Das, vice president of the Society of Composers and Lyricists, said Suno is intended to be a "stopping point along the way" to creation, as a "means to an end."

"Sometimes people take one song, and then they'll use AI to hear it in different genres or different potential sounds to see if they want to try to do that," Weiland told The Deep View.

AI is also inextricably tied to stem separation, or stripping songs into pieces so that musicians can isolate instruments, remove vocals, or create backing tracks. Perhaps first brought to general knowledge by Kanye West’s Stem Player, which was sold with the release of 2021’s "Donda," stem separation is a vital part of production. It can play a role in remixing, sampling, or inspiring new creations.

"There are a lot of really interesting creative applications for (stem separation), whether it's in remixing or fixing things or re-making legacy recordings," Jonathan Wyner, the head of artistic technology initiatives for Berklee Emerging Artistic Technology Lab at Berklee College of Music, told the Deep View. "There are certain things I can do in mastering that I could never have done before."

Wyner added that AI can be a helpful tool when musicians start with a vision and exercise "strong editorial control of the final version." Then, musicians can pull AI out of the equation and flesh out the piece themselves. Armin Van Buuren, a Dutch Grammy-nominated DJ and producer, takes a similar approach. He told The Deep View that he uses AI to ideate and build out demos, then has artists sing or play parts that AI helped him ideate.

"If you just accept its output as the whole finished thing," Wyner said, "then it's unlikely to be something that really reflects the artist."

Carmine-Emanuele Cella, a professor and composer who serves as co-director of UC Berkeley’s Center for New Music and Audio Technologies, taps into AI when he’s composing to smooth over "boring, time-consuming, frustrating, and menial" tasks. Cella himself has developed software specifically for this task.

What leads to stronger outputs is interacting with the creative process, not just pushing a button or typing a prompt, Seth Forsgren, co-founder and head of product for Flow Music, told The Deep View. Without a vision, "It's not going to be a great piece of art, and you're probably not going to love it that much."

Even musicians who think the tool is going to speed up their processes find it can slow them down, Forsgren said: "Now they have a million options and they can generate an unbelievable array of ideas and samples."

AI in the music industry may also go the same route as AI in enterprise contexts: Niche, small models for specific genres or styles, Robert Rowe, a New York University professor who teaches about music innovation, told The Deep View. "If you can train a small model to capture part of your own musical style… then it's really going to take off."

The controversy

Still, AI is tearing the music industry in two directions. More often than not, you’ll hear musicians railing against it, not championing it.

Producer and musician Jack Antonoff called AI music creators "godless whores" in a viral post on Instagram. Paul McCartney joined more than 1,000 musicians in creating a silent protest album, titled "Is This What We Want?," to discourage the UK government from letting AI models train on copyrighted work without a license.

King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, a band with more than 15 years of history, had to combat an AI-generated clone band called King Lizard Wizard, which appeared on Spotify after the group pulled its own music from the platform (specifically because of CEO Daniel Ek’s investment in AI military drone technology).

When AI replaces musicians, even just for one instrument track on a song, the effects extend beyond reputational harm for the act itself: It cuts into a swath of jobs. Session players and players-for-hire are particularly at risk, Weiland said, especially if they’re unionized. If you want to add a bass track, for example, AI is faster and cheaper than bringing someone into the studio.

All kinds of "middle-class musicians" can feel the impact, Prey said. That includes sync licensing staff and jingle writers, too. Entry-level jobs in music are primed to disappear. If AI does take those jobs away, the industry needs to create programs that allow emerging artists to break into the industry, Prey said.

"There are probably some creators who are embarrassed about using [AI]," said Das. "And there are probably many creators who are experimenting with using it and don't quite understand the ramifications of [it] yet."

The democratization pitch

The companies that are building AI music generation models are all generally driven by the same ideal: That the creation of music should be democratized, and that technological innovation can make that happen.

The democratization argument is the pitch that has turned music generation platform Suno into a $5.4 billion company after a $400 million funding round in June, with CEO Mikey Shulman noting in the company's blog post announcing the round that "music creation is no longer the domain of a niche few." Shulman has gone so far as to say in an interview with the 20VC podcast last January that, even for those niche few, "It's not really enjoyable to make music now."

AI isn't the first technology to democratize music. For instance, streaming broke down barriers that allowed artists to release music independently of major record labels, leading to the rise of "bedroom-produced records," Cecil Coleman, a drummer in Australian band Body Type, a former sync licensing worker, and a recent law school graduate, told The Deep View. "This is just the next step in that evolution," she said.

Historically, the technology behind recording music democratized it for those who couldn't afford to attend concerts, Forsgren said.

"The precedent of technology democratizing music is just a trend for all time," Forsgren said. "Having a piano was something that only the rich could have back in the Middle Ages. That's very different from today, where everybody can pick up that instrument and make music."

Flow Music, which is built on top of Google's Lyria models and allows users to build songs using a "conversational producer" for an iterative song development process, was founded by Forsgren as Producer.ai in 2023 and acquired by Google in April. Flow offers generative music capabilities, allowing users to generate, extend, remix or edit songs from text, image or audio files, as well as generate lyrics and instrumentals individually.

However, because full-blown generative use cases tend to stoke the strongest backlash, some AI companies are avoiding them entirely. Moises, an AI-powered music platform that pegs itself as the creative suite for musicians, "only works in building blocks," CEO Geraldo Ramos told The Deep View. Though Moises’ primary offering is stem separation, last year it launched its AI Studio, a generative tool that can create "context-aware" instrument stems around a musician's existing tracks. "We never do full song generation."

"When you mix AI and music, people think about the 'Suno type' of AI, which is not always the case," Ramos said. "Many of the tools that help musicians and producers are not generative. But I think AI got this bad rep because of the generative side, and some people get sensitive about that."

But even with fully-generative tooling, Forsgren said, it's a misconception that plugging in a prompt will automatically create a hit. AI is simply an extension of software like Ableton and Pro Tools—even if it makes production easier, you still have to know how to use it.

"We have these generative models: the Gemini model, the Lyria model, the Nano Banana model, the Omni model. Those are all what I think of as almost instruments, and we put those instruments into our studio," said Forsgren.

The data labyrinth

The problem with the democratization narrative, both legally and ethically, comes up when you remember what, exactly, is being democratized. One of the biggest criticisms of generative models for music is the data that these tools are built on.

It's why Moises decided from the jump to never rely on user data to train its models, opting instead for licensing agreements and using in-house musicians to record music for training. "If you're a musician and you put your creations inside Moises, it's yours, we don't touch it," said Ramos.

Because it's built on Google's Lyria models, Flow Music, meanwhile, follows Google's data policies as it relates to AI, Jeff Chang, director of product management at Google DeepMind, told The Deep View. It trains on music that it has legal rights to through terms of service and partner agreements. Additionally, Google Flow Music has a toggle settling that allows users to opt out of their data being used to train its models.

Chang said the company has done "a lot of work behind the scenes" to make sure Lyria models don't simply replicate or regurgitate existing works. This avoids the other side of the copyright problem: When AI generates something that sounds a little too close to existing work.

"We're working really hard to maximize the probability of that being a unique sound, a unique song, a unique musical thing that has never been heard before by anybody in the world," Chang said.

But not every company has been as careful. Suno is embroiled in legal battles with major record labels Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment, who allege that Suno trained its music generation model on copyrighted material without permission. The labels filed a second lawsuit against Suno in September, challenging its most recent model v6, in mid-September, alleging that the company stole more than 62,000 recordings from the labels. Additionally, a July report from 404 Media claims that Suno scraped millions of songs and lyrics from dozens of platforms, including YouTube Music, Deezer, and Genius.

Udio, Suno's biggest rival, has faced similar allegations, and is still in active litigation with Sony Music, which alleges that the company copied more than 30,000 recordings from artists on its roster. Udio, however, has settled with both Warner Music Group and Universal, each landing on agreements to build licensed AI music creation platforms. These settlements landed the labels in even more hot water, with the American Federation of Musicians launching its own lawsuit against the labels for breach of contract.

Suno and Udio could not be made available for interviews with The Deep View.

The brass tacks

Wrapped up in legal battles, record labels are walking a tightrope. They want to embrace technology that could help their artists improve and experiment, while they navigate deciding which organizations to settle with and which to continue litigating against so they can best protect their artist rosters. It's why several of the settlements between labels and AI companies have led to partnerships. Both entities see a money making opportunity.

For instance:

• In September, Sony became the first music company to join the Alliance for Responsible Innovation in the Arts and Media, or ARIAM, an initiative focused on responsible AI deployment across creative and media industries, specifically focused on licensing.
• Major labels and industry firms, including Warner, BMG and Believe, partnered with Suno in its launch of v6, its most recent model. Warner CEO Robert Kyncl told staff in a note that a "new creation-based revenue stream" will only grow as a result of AI, according to Axios.
• Additionally, BMG signed its own partnership with Suno in August to "develop entirely new music experiences" and ensure that artists under the BMG label that participate will be compensated.
• Suno aside, August, Universal, Sony and Warner backed the $76 million Series B funding round for Stability AI, a generative model company that offers image and audio creation.
• And Universal announced a multi-year partnership with AI voice firm ElevenLabs to create an "AI-powered music platform for fans" and develop tools for producers, artists and songwriters.

"They seem conflicted," said Das. "They seem like they can't decide if they want to be on this train, because they can be in agreement with the new technology, or if they want to protest this agreement, because it's stealing from them. And in reality, they're trying to do both at the same time."

Though Universal couldn't comment on ongoing litigation, Michael Nash, executive vice president and chief digital officer of the label, told The Deep View that deciding which AI companies are fit to partner with "comes down to alignment," determined by whether or not the artists rights and interests are prioritized and respected. "Is there an appropriate licensing framework?" said Nash. "Does the artist have control? And is there an economic model that rewards artists and songwriters for the value they bring?"

Though there are clear opportunities to create value with this technology, the industry is still navigating how to do so in a way that translates that value into revenue for artists and songwriters, said Nash.

"We went through that process with streaming and user-generated content. AI requires that same kind of business-model innovation," he said.

Starting from a point of copyright and associated rights could offer the foundation to work with these AI firms in a way that benefits all parties involved, he said. And copyright itself protects more than just the artist's revenue. It also protects the integrity of the original music, preventing others from misusing the work and distorting the artist's original intention.

"Our starting point has always been the artists and songwriters," said Nash. "Defend their rights, advance their interests, and build creative and commercial opportunities from there."

But copyright questions aren’t the only thing haunting the industry.

Along with the challenges posed by these AI companies themselves, streaming has created an opportunity for bad actors to hack the system and abuse it. Because streaming royalties generally work as a collective pot that’s distributed based on listens, spam tracks can dilute the revenue pool of actual musicians.

And AI is already starting to show itself as a force multiplier in creating those tracks:

• Last September, Spotify announced that it had deleted 75 million spam tracks from its platform in the past year. And because Spotify doesn't explicitly label AI music on its platform, some have created trackers to fill in the gaps, including websites like SlopTracker and SoullessMusic.com.
• Tidal, meanwhile, updated its policy so that 100% AI-generated tracks that are tagged with its AI detection badge, while allowed on the platform, are blocked from earning royalties. Any content that impersonates human artists, meanwhile, is stripped from the platform. To combat this, in July, Tidal announced that it would exclude AI-generated tracks from royalty distribution.
• YouTube is similarly cracking down on AI tracks, announcing in mid-October that it would label AI-generated songs across both its flagship streaming platform and YouTube Music.
• In April, French streaming service Deezer said that almost 75,000 AI-generated songs are uploaded to the platform every day, representing around 44% of its total daily uploads. As a result, Deezer launched a tool to identify AI-generated tracks both on its platform and others.
• And while Apple Music hasn't revealed how many AI-generated tracks it's had to contend with, the company has acknowledged the issue by launching AI transparency tags, though only if the label a track comes from explicitly declares that a song is AI.

"It's always hard to speak in absolutes when it comes to AI because it's all about how AI is being used," Sam Duboff, senior director and global head of marketing and policy at Spotify, told The Deep View. "An artist using AI as one part of their production process, intentionally … that's really different than using AI to flood a streaming service and try to steal royalties from the royalty pool or impersonate another artist."

Duboff said that the company has had to balance reaping the benefits of AI with fighting fraud, while also not "policing the creative tools that people use." Additionally, navigating the shifting perceptions that listeners and users have around AI has presented another dimension to this challenge.

"The single biggest problem is trying to build long-term solutions that make sense when the technology and opinions about it are changing faster than you can keep up," said Duboff.

Van Buuren said that things like bot tracks and dupes of real artists represent the worst-case scenario for AI. "There's a lot of people who are trying to cash in, and they're just being evil. They're copying other people. They're doing the wrong things," said Van Buuren.

And while the streamers are trying to bring the hammer down on bad actors, they, too, face a double-edged sword, attempting to embrace AI with one hand while fighting it with the other. Apple Music, YouTube Music and Spotify all brandish their own AI features, including AI-generated, prompt-based playlists and generative DJs.

"The worst-case scenario is that the streaming services that we use get absolutely flooded by this type of music, and … there's no ability to distinguish between an AI-generated track and an emerging artist that you maybe haven't heard of before," Prey said. "What happens is the only artists that are able to build a career are the ones that already have name recognition, or the ones that have institutional backing behind them."

The line in the sand

Despite the narrative that AI companies want to empower musicians and democratize the act of creating music, rather than breaking the foundations of music, the fact of the matter is that AI is undoubtedly disrupting the industry. Along with completely shifting the avenues that musicians have available to make a living, AI is fundamentally transforming creation itself.

AI has given people the ability to create music out of nothing other than an idea. And while the quality of the output of fully prompt-based AI music generation is generally questionable, musicians are still figuring out where along the spectrum AI use is ethically acceptable. And because the technology is changing everyday—as well as people's comfort levels with it—towing the line is a difficult balancing act, said Prey.

Some will only use it for brainstorming, only for ideation, or only to add one instrument track. And over time, the ethical line is going to change. Just as AutoTune was an industry concern until it became commonplace, Prey said, "a lot of artists are waiting for [AI use] to be normalized."

"It's definitely a moving target, and it always is with technologies like this," said Prey. "AI is not just using technology to assist you with certain things, it is literally coming up with the entire idea. Because we associate creativity so much with ideas, I think people are, rightly so, very suspicious of it."

For Das, the ethical line is where the machine starts doing the creating for you. If a tool offers to think, brainstorm, and create for the musician, rather than acting as a partner, then the question shifts: Who wrote this song if someone prompted an engine to come up with ideas, build out instrumentals and vocals, or generate a composition entirely?

"The line is … where it starts to infringe on the creation of the intellectual property, which I would define mostly as the composition," Das said.

When you let AI overtake creation, Cella said, "You are not responsible for the process anymore. You are essentially enslaved to the outcomes."

In its second major model release this week, Meta is going back to its open source AI roots.

On Thursday, the tech giant unveiled Muse Spark Open, which it's calling "the most capable US open-weight model to date," and fulfilling its promise it made in April to release the weights of Muse Spark. It represents the first meaningful contribution to the US open source market since the company's Llama models.

Notably, Meta said that this is the first model of its size class capable of running on two Apple M5 Ultra Mac Studios with the latest MLX framework. The model was specifically optimized to run on Mac Studio with M5 Ultra, with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg specifically calling out the work of Apple CEO John Ternus in a tweet announcing the models.

"We believe the future is for everyone, and that includes the freedom to run advanced models wherever, including at home," Meta said in the announcement.

The model is natively multimodal, clocking in at 816 billion total parameters with 42 billion active parameters and a one million-token context window. Meta said it was built to handle coding and agentic work, as well as long-horizon tasks, complex software engineering and multi-step reasoning.

• In benchmarks for model context protocol, academic use, deep reasoning and hallucination, the model beats out competitors from Thinking Machines, Nvidia's Nemotron, Mistral, and Chinese labs like Moonshot, Z.ai and Alibaba.
• However, Moonshot's controversial Kimi K3 still has it beat in the Terminal-Bench 2.1 and DeepSWE 1.1 benchmarks for coding and software development.

Muse Spark Open is available today through several API platforms, including Baseten, Fireworks AI, Groq, Modal, Nebius, OpenRouter and Together AI, and model weights can be downloaded from Amazon, Google Cloud, Hugging Face and Microsoft.

But Meta isn't the only company seeking to claim its piece of the US open source ecosystem. Also on Thursday, Nvidia unveiled Nemotron 3.5 Super VL, an open, multimodal model built specifically for complex, agentic enterprise workflows. The model features 120-billion parameters with 12 billion active, which balances "model capacity with inference efficiency," Nvidia said in its announcement.

The model is customizable for domain specific data, tools and policies, and performs well across coding, web research, document intelligence, cybersecurity and video understanding tasks, the company said. The model weights are available today, as well as the open datasets on Hugging Face.

Our Deeper View

In the US, the open source AI ecosystem is still finding its feet. But increasingly, enterprises and organizations are turning to open source models as a cost effective alternative to the expensive proprietary APIs that companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are pushing. Though Nvidia and Meta likely have different motivations for wanting to feed the open source ecosystem, with Nvidia's strategy largely driven by designing its hardware, the result is still more options for enterprises who want to save money without wanting to take on the security risks that Chinese open source models may present.