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Universal Music is launching an AI music platform with ElevenLabs

Universal Music Group partners with ElevenLabs on a licensed AI music platform enabling fan-made remixes, with artists opting in.

Universal Music Group announced a multi-year licensing agreement with ElevenLabs to build an AI platform letting users create remixes, mashups, and new takes from UMG's licensed catalog. Artists can choose whether to participate, and the companies promise fair compensation; the platform will remain separate from ElevenLabs' Music API and ElevenMusic generator. UMG already runs an AI music project with Udio and has licensing deals with Spotify, Nvidia, and Klay.

The Verge · AI · 6d agoAI industry

Elevenlabs makes Music v2.5 available via app and API with free and pro tier options

ElevenLabs releases Music v2.5 via app and API, claiming fuller, more natural songs preferred over v2 in blind listening tests.

ElevenLabs launched Music v2.5 for ElevenMusic, reporting that listeners preferred it in a blind test across 47,885 comparison pairs, especially for R&B, Soul, Hip-Hop, Rock, and orchestral tracks. The free tier offers five lossless downloads per day and Pro includes 400 per month, with attribution required on free and commercial use restricted by industry. Tracks based on other artists' songs are blocked, and v2 remains available alongside the API. ElevenLabs says existing Music models were trained on 'licensed stems and music,' distinguishing it from competitor Suno, which faces lawsuits for training on copyrighted content; a Universal Music Group licensing deal covers only future separate products.

The Decoder · 3d agoAI industry

Roland is getting into generative AI music with Melody Flip

Roland launched Melody Flip, a DAW plugin that generates genre-themed MIDI loops rather than complete songs like Suno or Udio.

Roland's Melody Flip is a DAW plug-in offering around 250 genre-based 'Palettes' for generating melodies, chord progressions, basslines, and drum patterns, either from scratch or derived from a reference track. Users can control genre, note density, BPM, and key but cannot use text prompts, and outputs are simple loops with General MIDI-style tones intended for MIDI export into a DAW. The launch follows well-received hardware releases like the SH-4d, Gaia 2, and TR-1000, though music-community sentiment toward generative AI may limit goodwill.

The Verge · AI · 12d agoAI industry

Suno replaces its AI models with a new one trained on licensed music as copyright suits pile up

Suno launched its v6 model family trained on licensed music from Warner, BMG and Believe as copyright lawsuits from Sony and Universal continue.

Suno unveiled a new model family — Suno v6, experimental v6 wild, and faster v6 mini — trained on licensed data from Warner Music Group, BMG and Believe, and plans to retire older models. New capabilities include prompt-based song editing, use of text/images/video as references, and instrument separation, plus a planned opt-in artist remix program. Suno settled with Warner last year and BMG last month, but still faces suits from Sony, Universal Music Group and artists like Jason Isbell, and has raised over $819 million to date.

TechCrunch · AI · 7d agoModel release

Suno launches v6 music models built with Warner, BMG, and Believe

Suno launches v6, v6-wild, and free v6-mini music models co-developed with Warner Music Group, BMG, and Believe, retiring all older models.

Suno's flagship v6 serves Pro and Premier subscribers, v6-wild targets experimentation, and v6-mini is free; all three understand vocals, instrumentation, structure, mood, and multimodal inputs, with text-based editing of individual song sections. The models were built with Warner Music Group, BMG, and Believe following Warner's November 2025 licensing settlement, while Universal and Sony continue litigating and a Munich court found v3.5 and v4 infringed six works. Suno reports more than 100 million users, over two million paying subscribers, and $300 million ARR after raising $400 million at a $5.4 billion valuation in June.

The Decoder · 7d agoModel release

StepAudio 3 Music Technical Report

StepAudio 3 Music introduces long-form text-controlled music generation using ABC-notation planning and flow-matching diffusion, ranking near the top music arena.

StepAudio 3 Music generates long-form, text-controlled music using a 50-Hz single-codebook tokenizer with 65,536 entries and a flow-matching diffusion Transformer over VAE latents. A Mixture-of-Experts autoregressive model first plans an arrangement in ABC notation (ABC-CoT) before predicting music tokens. With DPO fine-tuning, it tops AudioBox content and production quality scores and reaches Quality Elo 1105 on the Artificial Analysis Music Arena, behind Suno V5.5 and Mureka. Generation covers songs, accompaniment from dry vocals, and cover synthesis up to 5 minutes 30 seconds at 48-kHz output.

Hugging Face daily papers · 6d agoAI research

Driver’s License Data for Sale

Schneier on Security highlights that driver's license data is being sold, underscoring concerns over monetization of driver records and surveillance.

A post on Bruce Schneier's blog is titled 'Driver's License Data for Sale.' The available excerpt contains no article body, so the specifics of the reported data sales are not detailed. The topic concerns the commercial availability of driver's license records, a recurring data-privacy and surveillance theme on the blog.

Schneier on Security · 7d agoData breach

I rented a car, and within hours, my driver's license was for sale

Dark-web site Nexus is selling about 153 million driver's license scans, apparently harvested near real time from IDScan.net's service used by Hertz and others.

KrebsOnSecurity reported that the dark-web marketplace Nexus offered roughly 153 million driver's license scans for sale, including the author's license shortly after it was scanned at a car rental. New scans appeared within hours to a day of presentation, implying near real-time access to data flowing through IDScan.net's ID scanning service, which lists Hertz and 11 other companies as customers and captures infrared and ultraviolet spectra. License listings grew by about 400,000 over 24 hours, indicating the leak was ongoing. Nexus went dark hours after the report, and the FBI is investigating.

Ars Technica · Security · 14d agoData breach1

Suno releases its first AI music model made with record industry help

Suno released its v6 music model family (v6, v6-wild, v6-mini), the first trained with licensed data from Warner Music Group, BMG, and Believe.

Suno's v6 comes in three variants: v6, the more unpredictable v6-wild, and resource-light v6-mini offered free to all users. The model was trained from the ground up on a new dataset including licensed content from Warner Music Group, BMG, and Believe, plus user data, though it is unclear if all dubiously obtained content was excluded. v6 shows dramatically improved genre fidelity, adds plain-language chat editing of individual song elements, multi-element mashups, and prompts based on images, video, or audio. The Verge notes it still cannot produce intentional imperfections like off-key vocals, and v6 starts rolling out now with older models eventually retired.

The Verge · AI · 7d agoModel release

Latest open artifacts (#24): Motif-3, GLM-5.3, Hy4-preview and open model licenses

Interconnects surveys new open models—Motif-3, GLM-5.3, Hy4-preview—while analyzing a licensing split: Western labs opening up, Chinese frontier labs getting restrictive.

The roundup covers Motif-3 (MIT license, strong scores for its size), GLM-5.3 (switched from MIT to a custom license with a $10 billion revenue threshold and undefined 'affiliates' clause requiring Z.AI security review), and Tencent's Hy4-preview (competent but prone to overthinking). It also notes dots3-note-prev from RedNote/Xiaohongshu (won IMO 2026 with a perfect score), Qwen3.8-Flash-Next (125B-A6B with GDN and Qwen Sparse Attention), NVIDIA Nemotron-3.5-Lightning-30B-A3B-BF16, and Ling-3.0-flash. The core theme: Google and Meta adopted Apache 2.0 while Chinese frontier labs (Zhipu, Kimi K3, MiniMax M3) adopted restrictive commercial licenses.

Interconnects · 8d agoAI research

153M+ driver’s licenses for sale on new dark web platform

New dark web platform Nexus is selling 153 million driver's license scans; FBI investigates apparent breach of IDScan.net.

A dark web platform called Nexus claims to sell more than 153 million driver's license scans, 10 million ID cards, 3 million travel documents, and 579,000 medical cards including marijuana dispensary cards. KrebsOnSecurity linked the trove to identity verification provider IDScan.net, with records reportedly containing front-and-back images plus infrared and ultraviolet scans and timestamps matching holders' travel or car-rental activity. The FBI's New Orleans field office opened an investigation into the apparent breach; IDScan.net says it is investigating.

Malwarebytes Labs · 14d agoData breach

Claude's new system prompt really doesn't want to reproduce song lyrics

Anthropic published updated Claude consumer system prompts, including changes steering the model away from reproducing song lyrics, likely over copyright concerns.

Anthropic publishes system prompts for Claude.ai and Claude mobile apps, including historic revisions, and has reorganized them into an index with per-model pages such as the Haiku 4.5 page showing the original October 15, 2025 prompt and an updated January 18, 2026 version. The latest consumer prompt strongly discourages reproducing song lyrics, a behavioral constraint likely tied to copyright considerations. Prompts for Claude Cowork and Claude Code are not included in the published set.

Simon Willison · 14d agoAI safety & security1

FBI investigates breach of 153 million driving license records at IDscan.net

Scans of 153 million driver's licenses, traced to IDscan.net and including Pete Hegseth and Brian Krebs, were offered for sale on the dark web.

Digital scans of 153 million driver's licenses appeared for sale by a user on the Russian cybercrime forum Exploit, alongside over 10 million ID cards, 3 million travel documents, and 579,000 medical cards sold through a site called Nexus. KrebsOnSecurity traced the leak to identity verification provider IDscan.net, whose customers include car rental company Hertz, and victims reportedly include US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The FBI has opened an official inquiry into the source of the images, and IDscan.net has not issued an official statement.

CSO Online · 12d agoData breach1

FBI Investigates Nexus Claim of 153M+ Driver’s License Records

FBI is investigating dark web service Nexus's claim to sell access to over 153 million US and Canadian driver's license records.

A dark web service called Nexus claims to offer more than 153 million driver's license records from the United States and Canada. The FBI is investigating the claim. The scale of the alleged dataset would make it one of the larger exposed PII collections if verified.

SOCRadar · 9d agoData breach

TikTok Settles U.S. Child Privacy Case for $400 Million

TikTok will pay $400 million to settle U.S. DOJ/FTC claims that it violated COPPA by collecting data from children under 13.

The U.S. Department of Justice announced a $400 million settlement with TikTok and ByteDance resolving a 2024 lawsuit over violations of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). TikTok will pay $300 million immediately and $100 million upon entry of an order vacating a prior consent decree against its predecessor Musical.ly; it is one of the largest recoveries ever obtained in a COPPA case. The DOJ and FTC, filing in California, alleged TikTok knowingly allowed children under 13 to create accounts and illegally collected data via Kids Mode. TikTok was previously fined €345 million by Ireland's Data Protection Commission in 2023 for GDPR breaches involving children's data.

Security Affairs · 23d agoPolicy & legal

CMA-OT: Hierarchical Expert Supervision for Dance-to-Music Generation

CMA-OT aligns a music generator's latent features with hierarchical expert representations via curriculum learning and scale-aware optimal transport, improving dance-to-music quality.

CMA-OT introduces curriculum-guided multi-scale representation alignment with scale-aware optimal transport for dance-to-music generation. An external music expert provides hierarchical supervision over the generator's latent features, progressively transferring musical knowledge for stable representation learning. The optimal transport mechanism handles temporal mismatch and semantic variation across expert scales. Experiments on two datasets show state-of-the-art rhythmic synchronization, perceptual quality, and overall music generation.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 5d agoAI research

Adobe is trying to make its AI generators idiot-proof in Premiere

Adobe adds in-timeline generative media to Premiere, letting editors generate video and audio clips using Firefly, Veo, Runway, Luma, and Kling models.

Adobe's new Generative Media tool lets Premiere editors highlight empty gaps in the timeline and generate context-aware, editable video, sound effects, music, and soundscapes without leaving the project. Editors can choose among underlying models including Adobe Firefly, Google Veo, Runway, Luma, and Kling. Beta AI audio tools can separate overlapping speakers and duck music under speech, and an AI Assistant is coming to After Effects for plain-language project commands.

The Verge · AI · 8d agoAI industry

TART: A Modular Tool for Technique-Aware Audio-to-Tablature Guitar Transcription

TART pipeline transcribes guitar audio to tablature with fingering and technique labels, outperforming prior baselines by up to 8.5 Tab F1 points.

TART is a modular four-stage pipeline for audio-to-tablature guitar transcription, combining an audio-to-MIDI transcription model, an expressive technique classifier, an audio-conditioned T5 encoder-decoder for string-fret assignment, and an automated tablature generator. In zero-shot evaluation on GuitarSet, EGDB, and two noisy augmented benchmarks, it averages 81.35% audio-to-MIDI F50 (+6.67 over the best baseline), 71.8% string-fret Tab F1 (+8.5), and 54.08% end-to-end Tab F1. The authors state it is the first framework to generate tablature with both fingering and expressive technique annotations directly from guitar audio.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 6d agoAI research2

“Zlibrary my beloved”: Anthropic staff chats extolling piracy cited in Sony suit

Sony's copyright lawsuit against Anthropic now cites internal staff chats praising Z-Library piracy as evidence in the AI training-data dispute.

Sony's lawsuit against Anthropic cites internal staff chats in which employees extolled pirating books from Z-Library, according to Ars Technica. The suit forms part of the broader copyright dispute over torrented works used to train AI models. The article also notes AI-generated songs reaching the top of music charts, raising stakes for songwriters in the case.

Ars Technica · AI · 16d agoAI policy

m-a-p/YuE2-3B — new model trending #30 on Hugging Face

M-A-P released YuE2-3B, an open music generation model that outperforms Suno v5 on WildSongBench and runs locally on a 24GB GPU.

The M-A-P (multimodal-art-projection) team released YuE2-3B, an open-weights music generation model that turns lyrics and a style prompt into full songs with vocals and accompaniment. It uses an AR-NAR Mixture-of-Transformers backbone with symbolic planning and flow matching through a VAE, and supports editable scores (melody and chords, including ABC notation) plus agentic editing workflows. On 192 WildSongBench prompts it reports a SongBench average of 6.9632 (best-of-8) versus 6.8721 for Suno v5, claimed as state of the art among evaluated open and proprietary models. It runs 48 kHz stereo inference locally on a single 24GB NVIDIA GPU without quantization, with companion releases including YuE2-Vae, MERT-v2 encoders, the WildSongBench dataset, and SheetSage2.

Hugging Face trending models · 7d agoModel release1

IDScan confirms breach after hackers offer 153 million driver’s license scans for sale

IDScan confirmed hackers accessed customer data in its cloud after scans of roughly 153 million driver's licenses surfaced for sale on a dark web marketplace.

IDScan.net published a breach notice on September 4, after learning around September 1 that an unauthorized third party may have accessed or copied customer information in its cloud platform, potentially including full names and government-issued ID numbers. KrebsOnSecurity tied the incident to Nexus, a Russia-linked dark web marketplace selling access to over 153 million US and Canadian driver's license scans, plus 10 million ID cards, more than 3 million travel documents, and at least 579,000 medical cards. The company did not disclose how many customers were affected, is offering free credit monitoring, faces multiple lawsuits, and the FBI has opened an inquiry. IDScan's government ID authentication is widely used by banks, cannabis retailers, and gun stores.

The Record · 6d agoData breach in the wild

FBI Probes Service Selling 153M+ Drivers Licenses

Dark web service Nexus sells scans of 153M+ US and Canadian drivers licenses, apparently siphoned from a breached identity verification company; FBI opened an inquiry.

A new dark web identity theft service called Nexus, advertised on the Exploit forum, offers scans of more than 153 million drivers licenses from the US and Canada, plus over 10 million ID cards and millions of travel and medical documents. The data appears to come from an ongoing breach at a major Louisiana-based identity verification company, with records growing by roughly 400,000 in 24 hours. Records include high-ranking US officials such as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and timestamps suggest data was captured during car rentals and travel. The FBI's New Orleans field office has launched an official inquiry into the source of the images.

Krebs on Security · 15d agoData breach in the wild1

Srsly Risky Biz: America's Drivers Licence Breach is a National Security Disaster

Dark web service Nexus sold 153 million US and Canadian driver's licenses, linked to identity verification firm IDScan under FBI investigation.

Krebs On Security reported that a dark web service called Nexus sold access to 153 million US and Canadian driver's licenses, claiming over a year of continuous exfiltration from a major identity verification company, with roughly 400,000 new licences added in a single day. Krebs verified the data as genuine and linked the incident via circumstantial evidence to identity verification firm IDScan, whose licences of senior US officials including Secretary of War Pete Hegseth appeared in the database; the FBI is investigating and IDScan has confirmed a breach inquiry. The article argues the data has national security implications, citing how Chinese APT espionage (Anthem, Equifax, Marriott, OPM) and Bellingcat investigations exploited leaked databases. Class action suits are being prepared, and the piece calls for stricter oversight of identity verification firms.

Risky Business News · 7d agoData breach in the wild

YuE2 · Frontier Music with Symbolic Planning

YuE2, a 3.59B-parameter music generation model, scores 6.9632 on SongBench, beating Suno v5 via symbolic planning.

YuE2 is a music generation model of roughly 3.59B parameters and 28 layers supporting song creation, covering, and agentic editing through editable ABC symbolic scores. Its best-of-8 setting reaches 6.9632 on SongBench, the highest mean among 15 evaluated settings on WildSongBench (192 prompts), ahead of Suno v5 at 6.8721. The project also introduces MERT2, whose 632M-parameter encoders achieve state of the art on 14 of 15 MARBLE metrics, and SheetSage2, which transcribes beats, downbeats, key, chords, structure, and melody with SOTA on 10 of 13 benchmark metrics.

Hacker News · AIupdated · 6d agofirst · 6d agoModel release 2 sourcesHN 43↑ · 35 comments

Multiple Class Action Lawsuits Filed Against IDScan

At least four class-action lawsuits filed against IDScan.net over an alleged breach exposing 153 million driver's licenses; FBI investigating.

At least four class-action lawsuits were filed in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana against IDScan.net following reports of a potential mega-breach of driver's license data. A Russian cybercrime forum service called Nexus claimed over 153 million driver's licenses, mainly American and Canadian, plus over 10 million ID cards, travel documents, and medical cards. The FBI is investigating the incident, which was first reported by journalist Brian Krebs, and IDScan.net says it is investigating. IDScan.net provides B2B ID verification services for clients including Hertz, FedEx, and hundreds of US cannabis dispensaries.

Infosecurity Magazine · 9d agoData breach

StepAudio 3 Gen Technical Report

StepAudio 3 Gen unifies TTS, voice design, music, and sound effects via discrete autoregressive modeling over RVQ tokens.

StepAudio 3 Gen is a general-purpose audio generation model covering zero-shot TTS, voice design, vocal generation, sound effects, music, vibe speech, and mixed audio in one framework. It uses discrete autoregressive modeling over residual vector quantization (RVQ) tokens rather than the diffusion Transformer paradigm, with a StepAudio Tokenizer representing audio at 12.5 Hz in a shared 16x2048 residual code space. Key design principles include interference-aware progressive pretraining, an RVQ Adaptor for multi-codebook acoustic representations, and shared discrete autoregressive modeling. The model reports state-of-the-art performance on TTS and voice design while retaining strong generation across speech, vocals, sound effects, and music.

Hugging Face daily papers · 6d agoAI research

Love Electric Breach: 877,000 Driver Records Offered for $600

A forum seller is offering 877,000 driver records from UK EV salary-sacrifice broker Love Electric for $600; researchers found the sample looks authentic.

A seller named seraphims advertised 877,000 records from Love Electric Financial Services, an Edinburgh-based FCA-regulated EV salary sacrifice broker, for $600 in cryptocurrency. Ransomnews analysts verified a 999-row SQL Server export containing names, addresses, National Insurance numbers, and driving licence numbers, with internal relationships and licence-format checks consistent with genuine production data. The full record count remains unverified, and the company had not commented at publication; the breach highlights risks from third-party payroll-adjacent providers.

Security Affairs · 19d agoData breach

IDScan confirms breach after 153 million driver’s licenses leak on dark web

IDScan.net confirmed hackers accessed cloud-stored customer data after a dark web listing exposed 153 million US and Canadian driver's license scans.

IDScan.net, a Louisiana-based identity verification provider serving car rental companies, retailers, and cannabis dispensaries, confirmed unauthorized access to customer data stored on its cloud platform around September 1, 2026. A dark web marketplace called Nexus advertised more than 153 million US and Canadian driver's license scans, plus 10 million ID cards, 3 million travel documents, and 579,000 medical cards. Krebs traced the leak to IDScan.net, prompting an FBI New Orleans investigation; the company is notifying affected individuals and offering free credit monitoring while cooperating with federal law enforcement.

Help Net Securityupdated · 5d agofirst · 5d agoData breach in the wild 4 sources

A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya is a startup from a former Spotify leader for making music apps

Former Spotify innovation head raises $5.5M pre-seed for A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya, a startup building playful music-creation apps with selective generative AI features.

A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya, founded by former Spotify head of innovation Máuhan M Zonoozy, raised a $5.5M pre-seed round from Mantis VC, SV Angel, Boxgroup, Quiet Capital and others. The startup ships small music-play apps including Speed Surfer, Usersound, Stacks, Drops, Sampler, and the iOS mixer app bop, plus a new prompt-based sound creation feature. Zonoozy says the company deliberately avoids infusing AI into every product, arguing human taste and participation become more valuable as AI-generated content grows abundant.

TechCrunch · AI · 2d agoAI industry 2 sources

America's Driver's License Breach Is a National Security Disaster

Dark web service Nexus sells 153 million US/Canadian driver's licenses linked to a breach of identity verifier IDScan.

Krebs on Security revealed a dark web service, Nexus, selling access to 153 million driver's licenses and 3 million travel documents from US and Canadian citizens, roughly 63 percent of all US licenses. Circumstantial evidence links the data to identity verification firm IDScan, which confirmed it is investigating a breach, and the FBI is probing the incident. Licenses belonging to senior US officials, including Pete Hegseth, an FBI assistant director, and Krebs's own contacts were verified as genuine. The exfiltration appears ongoing, with the database growing by nearly 400,000 licenses in a single day, and the data carries significant national security value for foreign intelligence services.

Hacker News · security · 1d agoData breachHN 26↑ · 4 comments3· 1 read