The AI distillation scandal. A personal reckoning...

I have decided to take a brief pause in pushing that solution forward. Not because the problem is unsolvable or the window has closed, but because change in this industry moves on its own timeline, and the solution will still be here when the moment is right.

What is actually happening

In early 2026, three major AI companies accused each other of extracting capabilities without consent.
The irony was hard to miss:
Anthropic, which settled a 1.5 billion-dollar copyright suit over pirated books five months earlier, published a report about being stolen from. Five months later, music publishers filed a lawsuit against Anthropic covering more than 20,000 songs, seeking over three billion dollars in damages.

The chain is straightforward. AI companies trained on human creative work without compensating the creators. Those models became the foundation for commercial products worth hundreds of billions of dollars. The creators at the base of that chain received nothing and are now watching AI-generated content compete in the same royalty pools their work have been funding.

This is not a new story for the music industry. It is the same story it has lived through streaming, file sharing, and digital licensing, each time with value flowing up and compensation flowing nowhere in particular.

The solution exists

This is what I want to be clear about.

Blockchain-based copyright registration with immutable timestamping, automated micro-licensing at a 2% transaction cost and 60-second settlement, smart contract-driven royalty distribution, and automated orphan work resolution are all operational today. This infrastructure converts the extraction economy into a licensing economy by making consent cheaper than litigation.
It closes the "we could not identify the owner" loophole that has justified scraping entire catalogs. It makes the music industry's rights infrastructure as fast and machine-readable as the AI pipelines currently bypassing it.

When every musical work has a verified ownership record and a smart contract licensing interface, the incentive to extract without consent disappears.
That is not an optimistic projection.
It is a change in the economic calculation, and economic calculations are what actually drive behavior in this or any industry.

Why am I taking a pause?

I have spent more than 25 years watching this industry navigate technological disruption. I have been in rooms where the problem was clearly understood, yet the response was constrained (one of the most celebrated songwriters of the last 50 years put it plainly) "I don't want to go against the label. They control my income."
That sentence is not cynicism.

It is an honest description of how the industry is structured. The people with the most knowledge and the most standing to drive change are often the people most invested in the relationships that would need to change. Pushing against that current takes energy, and there are moments when the right move is to step back, let the situation develop, and return when conditions are more favorable.

The legal environment is shifting. Courts in the US and Germany have both moved toward finding that training on copyrighted material without consent carries real liability. The economic harm is becoming visible enough that the "don't rock the boat" calculation is starting to shift for more and more people in the industry. The threshold at which action becomes more rational than inaction is approaching.

My decision to pause is not a signal that the problem is too hard or that the timing is wrong for everyone. It is a personal assessment of where the conversation is and where my energy is best directed right now.

The door stays open

The infrastructure will not disappear. The solution does not expire. If anything, the case for it grows stronger with every new lawsuit filed, every royalty pool diluted, and every model generation trained on unlicensed content.

The music industry has always moved at its own pace. Those who grasped the streaming transition earliest waited years for institutional momentum to catch up. Those who understood the publishing rights implications of digital licensing fought for a decade before the frameworks shifted. That is the rhythm of this industry, and fighting against it is less effective than knowing when to press and when to hold.
I am holding for now.

The solution and the analysis remain, and the moment when the industry is genuinely ready to act will come.

When it does, the infrastructure will be in place, and so will I.