Apple & Meta Bring Muse to Mac, Anthropic Opens Up & Deezer Filters AI Music

The host of Hard Fork AI opens the episode with a personal disclosure: he generates roughly 20 million streams per year on Spotify across a handful of anonymous artist accounts, a significant portion of which comes from AI-generated music. This revelation frames his perspective on one of the episode's key stories — Deezer's plan to let users filter out AI-generated music — which he supports despite it potentially costing him income. The episode covers a broad mix of AI industry developments: stock market jitters about AI investment returns, Anthropic granting unprecedented internal access to independent safety researchers, a surprising Apple-Meta collaboration on local AI models, and new transparency features from music streaming platforms.

Stock Market Shows Signs of Strain on AI Investment Doubts

According to NBC News, US stocks are showing "cracks" just one week after hitting fresh all-time highs. The S&P 500 fell 1% from its record, while the tech-heavy NASDAQ dropped more than 3% from its peak. The host frames this as investors beginning to worry about returns on the trillions of dollars poured into AI infrastructure.