The Hallucination HQ
AI news that's actually fun to read — 2026-05-22
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Today's Hallucination HQSpotify and Universal Say You Can Now Remix Ariana Grande. Ariana Grande Gets a Cut.
Spotify and Universal Music Group have struck a deal letting Premium subscribers create AI-generated covers and remixes of tracks from participating artists — who will, crucially, receive a share of revenue. This is either a genuinely elegant solution to the AI-music licensing mess, or the music industry accidentally inventing karaoke capitalism. Probably both. The artists opt in, the fans get creative, and Spotify gets to feel progressive without actually changing its royalty rates.
Source: TechCrunch
Graduates Discover That Booing Is Free
Class of 2026 graduates have been loudly heckling tech executives who turn up to commencement speeches and extol the virtues of AI — the very technology many of them believe ate their job market for breakfast. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt is among those who received the treatment. The executives appear genuinely baffled, which suggests they have not recently applied for a job, checked LinkedIn, or spoken to anyone under thirty. The students, for their part, seem to be enjoying the only unscripted part of the ceremony.
Source: The Verge
$700 Million for a Product Nobody's Seen. Investors Reportedly Fine With This.
Hark has raised $700 million in a Series A — a funding round, for context, that is usually the small one — for an AI platform it describes as "universal" and has not yet released. The company plans to launch multimodal models this summer, followed eventually by dedicated hardware. What it does, exactly, remains somewhat shrouded in mystery, which is either deeply suspicious or a masterclass in pre-launch marketing. Either way, someone handed them seven hundred million dollars, so perhaps the mystery is working.
Source: TechCrunch
Anthropic Is Paying Elon Musk $15 Billion a Year. Elon Musk Competes With Anthropic.
SpaceX's IPO filing has revealed that Anthropic — maker of Claude, which competes directly with Musk's own Grok — is paying $15 billion annually to use SpaceX's Colossus data centres in Memphis. This is the corporate equivalent of renting your rival's spare bedroom, except the bedroom costs fifteen billion dollars and hums very loudly. The arrangement does make a certain brutal sense: Anthropic needs compute, SpaceX has compute, and ideology apparently takes a back seat to infrastructure.
Source: The Verge
Anthropic Held a Developer Conference in London. Pure Coincidence It Was Google I/O Day.
Anthropic's two-day Code with Claude event for software developers ran in London from May 19 — the same date as Google's I/O conference in California. Anthropic staff were quick to clarify this was a coincidence, not a flex, which is exactly what you'd say if it were a flex. The event showcased a future where AI writes significant chunks of production code, a vision that landed with developers somewhere between "fascinating" and "I need to lie down." The vibes, by all accounts, were strong. The implications, rather less relaxing.
Source: MIT Technology Review
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