Sony's 260,000 ai deepfakes and the takedown queue nobody can clear

Sony has asked platforms to pull 260,000 ai deepfakes#

The fox does not count every rabbit in the field. It reads the hedgerow, marks the runs, and works the trail that keeps yielding. Sony Music has been doing the arithmetic for three years now, and the trail it is counting has turned into a flood. ai deepfakes, the generative tracks that copy an artist's voice and likeness without a word of permission, are landing on streaming services and social platforms faster than any single label can fish them out.

On 5 October 2026 the Financial Times reported that the music major had asked platforms to remove more than 260,000 of them, cumulative to the end of September, a figure Music Business Worldwide and Billboard both relayed the same day. The paper put the count almost double the 135,000 the company had flagged only six months earlier, and named the artists being imitated: Harry Styles, Adele, Britney Spears, Queen and Michael Jackson.

The definition matters, because a takedown queue is only as sharp as the thing it is built to catch. Sony told the FT the targets were generative AI deepfake tracks that imitate its artists' voices and likenesses without permission, and that the problem is happening at scale, harms artists, misleads fans and undermines the ethical use of AI. That is a likeness claim, not a copyright claim, and the distinction is where the whole fight now sits.

For a label, a distributor, an artist manager or a brand licensing a synthetic voice, the number is not trivia. It is a demand signal running the wrong way: the supply of fake songs is compounding while the machinery for clearing them is still a person with a spreadsheet and a portal login.

Read the gap, not the ends. A queue that nearly doubles in two quarters is not a queue being worked; it is a mouth being fed. The fox counts the widening distance between the two marks, because that distance is the only number that tells you whether the line is holding.

The 125,000 ai deepfakes filed in a single half year#

Three years of notices tell one story in four numbers. In November 2023, Dennis Kooker, Sony Music's president of global digital business, told a US Senate forum hosted by Chuck Schumer that the company had sent close to 10,000 takedowns. By March 2025 the figure had passed 75,000, set out in Sony's submission to the UK government's consultation on AI and copyright. By March 2026 it was above 135,000, a rise the BBC first reported. And now, at the end of September 2026, it is past 260,000.

Put the last two points side by side and the run-rate writes itself. Music Business Worldwide calculated that the jump works out at more than 20,000 removal requests a month between April and September, and Arise News put the six-month addition at more than 125,000 notices on top of the March total. That is the number a rights team now has to plan against, because it is the number that has to be staffed.

The discs tell the story a table would hide. Growth of this kind is not linear and it is not gentle; it is a curve that steepens each time you look away. For anyone budgeting a rights-protection function, the honest planning assumption is that next March's number will embarrass this one.

Sony's own language has hardened to match. The label told the FT it will keep enforcing its artists' rights and expects platforms to act quickly and stop the same content reappearing, but called the exercise "an uphill struggle". A setback admitted by the plaintiff is the most useful sentence in any enforcement story, because it tells you where the friction actually lives.

Why the ai deepfakes keep coming back#

The queue refills because the demand is real and the cost of supplying it is close to zero. Kooker described the pattern to the IFPI's Global Music Report as a demand-driven event: fakes surge when an artist is in cycle and out promoting, feeding on the attention a release campaign has just paid to create. The deepfake is a parasite on the marketing budget.

That is why removal alone never finishes the job. A takedown clears one file; it does not clear the reason the file existed. When the same track returns under a new upload within hours, the rights holder is not policing a catalogue, it is swiping at a stream. Fraud compounds it. Scammers mass-produce tracks with AI and point bots at them, and label executives told the Financial Times that streaming fraud could cost the industry as much as $2.2bn a year. What Sony has not said is how many of the flagged tracks platforms actually removed, or which services received the most requests, a gap Music Times flagged when it reported the figure.

The supply side is now industrial at the platform level too. Deezer reported on 21 July 2026 that fully AI-generated tracks had, for the first time, passed half of all its daily new music deliveries at peak, a monthly average of about 90,000 tracks a day, as its own newsroom set out and TechCrunch and Music Business Worldwide both covered.

Half the field is now synthetic and the sieve at the gate is human-sized. That is the operational sentence under this whole story: the volume of ai deepfakes arriving is set by generative tooling that scales, while the volume being cleared is set by teams that do not.

That Reddit line is the demand-side truth the queue rarely gets credit for. Saturation is doing part of the enforcement for the industry: the novelty of a cloned voice fades long before the legal process does. Listeners are the sieve nobody budgets for, and their boredom is the one filter that never files a takedown.

likeness rights and the patchwork of deepfake regulation#

The reason the queue will not close on its own is legal, not technical. There is no single US federal law that gives a musician a clean right over their own voice; instead there is a patchwork of state protections, and that patchwork is exactly the loophole platforms point to when they drag their feet. deepfake regulation in the United States is a fifty-state mosaic with a federal blank space at its centre, and ai deepfakes sit in that blank space.

Tennessee moved first. Its Ensuring Likeness Voice and Image Security (ELVIS) Act, signed in March 2024 and effective that July, added a person's voice, actual or simulated, to the property rights already covering name, image and likeness, so a cloned voice can be enforced against as a class A misdemeanour, as Holland and Knight's analysis explains. At federal level there is no likeness statute, so protection runs through a state patchwork, and Tennessee's ELVIS Act, effective July 2024, was the first to cover a simulated voice.

Across the Atlantic the rule is already written. Article 50 of the EU AI Act requires providers of generative systems to mark synthetic audio, image, video and text in a machine-readable, detectable format, and requires deployers to label deepfakes clearly for people, not merely watermark them, as the Commission's guidance sets out. The US Copyright Office's AI initiative has been weighing the training-and-output questions in parallel.

For a brand or a label, the practical reading is that likeness rights are now a diligence line, not a footnote. If you cannot say where a synthetic voice came from and on what consent, you are one deepfake away from explaining the gap to an artist, a regulator and a fan base at the same time.

How to defend a release campaign from ai deepfakes#

The defence has three parts, and each one maps to a team that already exists. The artists being imitated are the ones with the loudest campaigns, which means the defence has to be built into the release itself rather than bolted on after a fake chart. Detection, likeness posture and release-campaign defence are the three fox trails worth walking.

Start with detection that runs before the fakes do. Monitor the platforms where impersonations surface fastest, watch for new uploads carrying your artists' voices, and log every match with a timestamp, so the pattern is evidence rather than anecdote. Then tighten the likeness posture: know which voices are consented, which are licensed and which are off limits, and be able to prove it in a sentence.

Finally, build the campaign to resist the copy. Register the release, seed the real audio where discovery already happens, and give the fan base a reason to prefer the authorised version. The same discipline runs through content marketing and paid social: put the true thing where the appetite already is, and let the counterfeit look like the poor copy it is.

None of that requires a new platform; all of it requires the same thing Sony's numbers expose, a steady hand on a queue that wants to run away. This is the quieter half of brand strategy in a synthetic market, and it is why music industry marketing now starts with the voice, not the campaign.

The detection layer is the missing piece for most teams, and it is built from search, GEO and content visibility, and it is the same discipline we brought to the right of publicity fight around Suno. David Isbell's case and Sony's queue are two views of one problem, and both say the same thing: the voice is the asset now.

Name the voices, set the posture, staff the queue. 260,000 notices went in; the next quarter decides how many come back out. start the conversation.

Frequently asked questions#