Every published Top AI Stories item tagged with Arts, Entertainment & Recreation, newest first.
Authentic Brands Group, which controls Presley's music and likeness, sued Anthropic on Friday, Billboard first reported, alleging Claude was trained on 274 of his songs, from "All Shook Up" to "Don't Be Cruel." The suit seeks the statutory maximum of $150,000 per song, roughly 41 million dollars in all. It says that even after Anthropic added guardrails, Claude recreated songs "for a modern audience" and conceded the results were "edging past 'inspired by' into reproducing the copyrighted song." It follows the August suit from Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell, and is one of the first brought by an artist's estate rather than a label.
Spotify said it removed more than 50 million songs it judged to be AI-generated slop or spam from recommendations over the past year, and changed its recommendation system to favor music made by people. It flags tracks using listener feedback, upload patterns, metadata and outside AI-detection tools, and says complaints about such music have fallen since. The figure follows the AI Persona badge Spotify announced in August for artists who are not real people; it still stops short of labeling every AI-made track, as YouTube Music now does.
Character.AI's bankruptcy sale has its first bid for the people behind it. Disney has agreed to offer jobs to at least 60 of the chatbot startup's employees, a majority of its workforce, and the vast majority have accepted, according to a court filing first reported by Bloomberg and covered by TechCrunch. The offers carry roughly 60 million dollars a year in pay. The arrangement is a stalking-horse bid, so another buyer could still top it, and it comes on top of Disney's 20 million dollar offer for a license to some of Character.AI's technology. Character.AI's bankruptcy filing blamed high costs and the legal and regulatory exposure from lawsuits and state investigations over child safety.
Character.AI has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and put itself up for a court-supervised sale, listing assets and liabilities of between 50 million and 100 million dollars. Disney has offered $20 million for a non-exclusive, perpetual license to some of its technology, a reversal for a company that sent Character.AI a cease-and-desist letter in September 2025 over its Disney chatbots. Disney has since hired former Character.AI chief executive Karandeep Anand as its first chief technology officer. No one has yet bid for the platform itself, and the company says it will shut down if no buyer emerges before the sale closes in late November or early December. The filing comes days after Kentucky unsealed chats from its lawsuit against the company.
Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite and the Unreal Engine, is moving its Disney project to an "AI first" model in which models such as Anthropic's Claude write all of the code and generate the artwork, while developers manage and guide the output, Bloomberg reported from internal messages. The Marvel and Star Wars shooter, part of a $1.5 billion partnership, had been due out in March 2027 and is now delayed indefinitely. Chief executive Tim Sweeney confirmed "a huge pivot" on social media and said the aim is to build more, not to do the same work with fewer people. Epic laid off more than 1,000 employees in March.
The label signed a multiyear licensing agreement letting listeners draw on its catalog to make remixes, mashups and new takes on tracks, with artists choosing whether to take part. The platform will stay separate from ElevenLabs' existing music generator. This is a different deal from the Suno model that shipped a day earlier on Warner and BMG catalogs; Universal already has arrangements with Udio, Spotify, Nvidia and Klay. Taken together, the majors have moved within a year from suing generative music companies to licensing them.
Pocket FM says its annualized run rate reached 500 million dollars, double where it stood a year ago, and that AI now produces 93 percent of its catalog and 99 percent of new releases. The company puts the saving at roughly 80 times, with 100 hours of audio that once took a year now produced in a day. About 70 percent of revenue comes from the United States, sold as episode unlocks rather than subscriptions, and the business is profitable on an adjusted basis while raising fresh money, at a valuation of about two billion dollars.
Stability AI raised $76 million in a Series B whose investor list is the story: Universal Music Group, Sony Music Group, Warner Music Group, Electronic Arts, AMD Ventures and Pacific Alliance Ventures. That brings the company to $232 million raised under chief executive Prem Akkaraju, who joined in 2024. The money goes to a creative production suite and a professional services arm, with the labels positioned as co-developers rather than licensees, which is a markedly different posture from the copyright litigation running elsewhere between rights holders and generative media companies.
Twitch will let Amazon train generative models on creators' stream recordings by default, with the opt-out sitting in channel settings rather than the creator dashboard. Chief product officer Mike Minton was unusually direct about why: "If this was opt-in, nobody would opt in. That's honestly the answer." Nearly 3,000 users joined an official Twitch stream to object. Asked whether videos had already been used for training, Minton said he did not know.
Artists can now self-declare as an "AI Persona" in Spotify for Artists, and from mid-September the badge starts appearing on profiles, in search and on playlist track rows. Spotify will also apply a "Likely AI Persona" label itself, using a mix of human and automated review of profiles whose name and imagery appear to be photorealistic AI-generated identities. Those artists are excluded by default from editorial and algorithmic recommendations unless a listener follows them. Spotify stresses the badge is about the artist's public identity, not about how the music was made.
Suno says it will add watermarking and fingerprinting so its output can be identified once it leaves the platform, plus a download policy meant to block mass uploads to streaming services, and it has licensed Musixmatch's Sentinel system to detect lyric copying. Asked whether the watermark would use Google's SynthID or something proprietary, the company declined to say — which matters, because an identifier only helps if the platforms receiving the music can read it. Suno is defending suits from Universal and Sony coordinated by the Recording Industry Association of America, and lost a copyright ruling to the German rights society GEMA in July.
Merlin, which represents independent labels and distributors across more than 70 countries and roughly 15 percent of the global recorded-music market, signed on to Spotify's forthcoming fan-made covers and remixing product. Member labels choose whether their artists take part, and the tool will launch as a paid add-on so participating artists earn from it. "Every creation drives listeners back to the original work," said Spotify senior vice president Charlie Hellman. Universal Music Group had already backed the product separately, which puts both the major-label and independent halves of the market inside a format that did not exist a year ago.
ByteDance released Seedance 2.5 on July 31, extending a single generation to 30 seconds with multi-round extensions the company says can build multi-minute pieces that hold a consistent audiovisual language. The model accepts up to 30 reference images, ten video clips, and ten audio clips at once, and adds timestamp-level audio and video editing, green screen, and camera perspective control. It is live in Jimeng and Doubao Pro; the company lists programmatic access through BytePlus ModelArk as coming soon.
Google put Lyria 3.5 into Flow Music, its consumer song-generation app, with richer melodic structure, closer adherence to lyric prompts, more emotionally nuanced vocals and better pronunciation, plus finer control over tempo and duration. It arrives as a free upgrade for existing Flow Music users rather than a new paid tier. Flow Music is Google's most direct answer to Suno and Udio, and Lyria is now the model underneath it.
Streaming service Deezer said fully AI-generated songs have, for the first time, passed 50 percent of its daily uploads — roughly 90,000 tracks a day, up from 44 percent in April. The flood barely registers with listeners, accounting for just 1 to 3 percent of streams, up to 85 percent of which Deezer flags as fraudulent. The company is tagging AI tracks, cutting them from recommendations and playlists, and removing fraud-linked and long-unstreamed uploads. "We have reached a pivotal moment," CEO Alexis Lanternier said.
In its copyright fight with Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros., Midjourney filed a motion to widen discovery — demanding the studios disclose how they use generative AI internally, not just in consumer products. Midjourney argues the studios are "cherry-picking" documents and hiding evidence that they do "exactly what they are suing Midjourney for doing." The gambit aims to bolster a fair-use defense by showing that the studios themselves lean on AI trained on copyrighted work.
Google DeepMind and the independent film studio A24 announced a research partnership that pairs the lab's researchers with A24's filmmakers to develop new creative tools and production workflows, with Google also taking an undisclosed equity stake in the studio. The companies named no specific models and set no fixed deliverables, framing it as open-ended, exploratory work. It is a notable move as frontier labs court Hollywood, arriving amid ongoing tension over AI's role in creative work.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences approved new eligibility rules on Friday that disqualify AI-generated performances and AI-written screenplays from the 99th Academy Awards in March 2027. Acting nominations now require performances "demonstrably performed by humans with their consent," and the Academy reserved the right to demand details on AI usage in any submitted film. Industry tension after the Val Kilmer deepfake in *As Deep as the Grave* and the AI "actress" Tilly Norwood pushed the rule shift; the changes also widen international-feature eligibility via major festival wins.