The brand new rules of AI music

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. In the future, you are getting sued by Universal Music. The following, you are constructing a platform together. Welcome to the brand new reality of AI music for Udio.

But as UMG celebrates a brand new licensing deal and future revenue streams for artists, Udio’s users aren’t as comfortable — watching their creative freedom disappear with the press of a disable button.

In today’s AI rundown:

• Universal settles with AI music platform Udio

• Canva’s design model, ‘Creative Operating System’

• Prepare for job interviews with NotebookLM

• Claude shows limited ‘self-awareness’

• 4 recent AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

AI & THE MUSIC INDUSTRY

🎶 Universal settles with AI music platform Udio

The Rundown: Universal Music Group just settled its copyright lawsuit against AI music generator Udio and announced a brand new three way partnership to launch a licensed AI music platform in 2026 — marking the primary major deal of its kind for the industry.

The small print:

• The deal features a financial settlement and licensing for UMG’s catalog, with the long run platform allowing users to remix songs and create in artists’ styles.

• Artists who opt in to the approaching platform can be compensated for each model training and when their songs are remixed.

• Udio immediately disabled song downloads as a part of the transition to limit access exclusively throughout the platform, sparking backlash from its user base.

• UMG also announced a brand new “strategic alliance” with Stability AI to create recent AI tools for artists with a deal with responsibly trained model development.

Why it matters: Very like within the journalism/AI battle, UMG is shifting from plaintiff to partner, and potentially opening the floodgates for a brand new blueprint on how major labels will approach AI music. But Udio’s abrupt, transitory moves also completely blindsided its user base, which lost a major amount of creative freedom overnight.

TOGETHER WITH REDIS

📈 Cache smarter, scale AI faster

The Rundown: Semantic caching is the backbone of high-performing AI teams —  helping devs construct and scale apps by reusing LLM responses, cutting costs, and delivering real-time experiences which can be supernaturally fast.

See how semantic caching can:

• Cut LLM costs by as much as 90%

• Boost app performance with easy recall

• Scale AI workloads without latency

Try the free LangCache calculator to see your savings.

CANVA

🚀 Canva’s design model, ‘Creative Operating System’

The Rundown: Canva introduced a series of AI upgrades, including the corporate’s own foundation model trained on design principles, a brand new Creative Operating System that generates fully editable designs, video editing upgrades, and more.

The small print:

• The Canva Design Model understands structure and hierarchy to provide completely editable designs, with integration into ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.

• The Creative Operating System’s tools include Video 2.0 for streamlined editing, forms, data connectors, email design, and a 3D generator.

• Grow consolidates marketing workflows by letting teams browse winning ads, create brand-aware variations, publish on to Meta, and track performance.

• Canva’s 2024 acquisition of pro-design tool Affinity can be relaunching as an all-in-one free creative app with built-in Canva integrations.

Why it matters: AI design tools have come a great distance up to now yr, and Canva is keeping itself on pace with the acceleration. Now with its own model and an AI feature for each creative need, the disruptive platform is just not only empowering its users, but in addition reducing the necessity to ever hop to other rivals or more ‘skilled’ options.

AI TRAINING

🎯 Prepare for job interviews with NotebookLM

The Rundown: On this tutorial, you’ll learn tips on how to use NotebookLM to arrange for job interviews by robotically gathering company research, generating practice questions, and creating personalized study materials.

Step-by-step:

1. Go to NotebookLM, click “Recent Notebook” and name it “Goldman Sachs Data Analyst Interview Prep”, then click “Discover Sources” and prompt: “I would like sources to arrange for my Data Analyst interview at Goldman Sachs”

2. Click settings, select “Custom” style, and configure: Style/Voice: “Act as interview prep coach who asks tough questions and provides feedback” Goal: “Help me crack the Data Analyst interview at Goldman Sachs”

3. Ask: “What are the highest 5 behavioral questions for this role?”, click “Save to Note”, then three dots → “Convert to Source” so as to add Qs to source material

4. Click the pencil icon on “Video Overview”, add focus: “The right way to answer behavioral questions for Goldman Sachs Data Analyst interview”, and hit Generate for personalized prep video

5. Watch the video multiple times to internalize the answers and delivery style in your interview

Pro tip: Try comparing solutions across scenarios to grasp the underlying reasoning patterns. This helps construct higher problem-solving skills for future challenges.

PRESENTED BY SALESFORCE

🧠 Takeaways from Dreamforce 2025

The Rundown: The Agentic Enterprise pairs human expertise with AI agents for boundless capability, precision, and speed, creating recent capabilities, revenue, and work methods — and at Dreamforce 2025, top leaders explored what’s needed to make the transition.

Discussion topics included:

• A deal with scalable, sustainable change

• A brand new enterprise architecture

• Deeply integrating AI across the product suite

Dive into more takeaways. 

AI RESEARCH

🪞 Claude shows limited ‘self-awareness’

The Rundown: Anthropic researchers published a brand new study finding that Claude can sometimes notice when concepts are artificially planted in its processing and separate internal “thoughts” from what it reads, showing limited introspective capabilities.

The small print:

• Specific concepts (like “loudness” or “bread”) were implanted into Claude’s processing, with the AI accurately noticing something unusual 20% of the time.

• When shown written text and given injected “thoughts,” Claude was capable of accurately repeat what it read while individually identifying the planted concept.

• Models adjusted internally when instructed to “take into consideration” specific words while writing, showing some deliberate control over their processing patterns.

Why it matters: This research shows AI could also be developing some ability to observe their very own processing, which could make models more transparent by helping accurately explain reasoning. Nevertheless it is also a double-edged sword — with systems potentially learning to raised conceal and selectively report their thoughts.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• ⚙️ Cursor 2.0 – Recent interface to code with as much as 8 agents in parallel

• 💨 SWE-1.5 – Cognition’s recent fast agentic coding model

• 🗣️ Sonic 3 – Cartesia’s realistic text-to-speech model for voice agents

• 🎥 Character Cameos – Create custom characters in Sora 2

📰 All the things else in AI today

OpenAI is exploring an IPO for 2026 that might value it at as much as $1T, with CEO Sam Altman saying it’s “the most certainly path for us, given the capital needs that we’ll have.”

Perplexity launched Patents, a free AI patent search tool that uses natural language queries to seek out relevant IP across databases, papers, and public repositories.

OpenAI introduced Aardvark in private beta, a GPT-5-powered AI agent that autonomously discovers, validates, and patches security vulnerabilities in codebases.

Anthropic opened its first Asia-Pacific office in Tokyo, also signing a cooperation agreement with the Japan AI Safety Institute.

Figma acquired AI creative platform Weavy, rebranding it as Figma Weave to expand the corporate’s capabilities in image, video, animation, and VFX creation.

OpenAI released a brand new character cameo feature for Sora 2, allowing users to create videos of custom characters, pets, and more while maintaining consistency.

COMMUNITY

🤝 Community AI workflows

Every newsletter, we showcase how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.

Today’s workflow comes from reader Anonymous in Omaha, NE:

“I’m responsible my department’s monthly P-Card reconciliations, and I exploit NotebookLM Pro to maintain me organized. I upload all of the receipts and approval forms for the month right into a single notebook, after which use it as I work through the fees. For instance, I’ll ask it: “Is there a transaction from September 14 within the files?” I tell my colleagues it is a super-charged search engine. No more sifting through dozens of PDF files on the lookout for a single charge or coming up with hyper-specific file names.”

How do you employ AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: Extropic’s 10,000x AI energy breakthrough

• Read our last Tech newsletter: Grokipedia is here, prefer it or not

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: NEO home bot, now open for preorders

• Today’s AI tool guide: Prepare for job interviews with NotebookLM

• Watch our last live workshop: Construct PPTs with Claude Skills

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — the humans behind The Rundown