Good morning, AI enthusiasts. One day, you're getting sued by Universal Music. The next, you're building a platform together. Welcome to the new reality of AI music for Udio.

But as UMG celebrates a new licensing deal and future revenue streams for artists, Udio's users aren’t as happy — watching their creative freedom disappear with the click 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 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

AI & THE MUSIC INDUSTRY

🎶 Universal settles with AI music platform Udio

Image source: UMG

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

The details:

• The deal includes a financial settlement and licensing for UMG's catalog, with the future platform allowing users to remix songs and create in artists' styles.

• Artists who opt in to the coming platform will be compensated for both model training and when their songs are remixed.

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

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

Why it matters: Much like in the journalism/AI battle, UMG is shifting from plaintiff to partner, and potentially opening the floodgates for a 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 significant 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 build and scale apps by reusing LLM responses, cutting costs, and delivering real-time experiences that are supernaturally fast.

See how semantic caching can:

• Cut LLM costs by up to 90%

• Boost app performance with instant recall

• Scale AI workloads without latency

Try the free LangCache calculator to see your savings.

CANVA

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

Image source: Canva

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

The details:

• The Canva Design Model understands structure and hierarchy to produce 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 directly to Meta, and track performance.

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

Why it matters: AI design tools have come a long way in the past year, and Canva is keeping itself on pace with the acceleration. Now with its own model and an AI feature for every creative need, the disruptive platform is not only empowering its users, but also reducing the need to ever hop to other rivals or more ‘professional’ options.

AI TRAINING

🎯 Prepare for job interviews with NotebookLM

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how to use NotebookLM to prepare for job interviews by automatically gathering company research, generating practice questions, and creating personalized study materials.

Step-by-step:

1. Go to NotebookLM, click "New Notebook" and name it "Goldman Sachs Data Analyst Interview Prep", then click "Discover Sources" and prompt: "I need sources to prepare 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 gives feedback" Goal: "Help me crack the Data Analyst interview at Goldman Sachs"

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

4. Click the pencil icon on "Video Overview", add focus: "How 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 for your interview

Pro tip: Try comparing solutions across scenarios to understand the underlying reasoning patterns. This helps build better 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 capacity, precision, and speed, creating new capabilities, revenue, and work methods — and at Dreamforce 2025, top leaders explored what’s needed to make the transition.

Discussion topics included:

• A focus on scalable, sustainable change

• A new enterprise architecture

• Deeply integrating AI across the product suite

Dive into more takeaways. 

AI RESEARCH

🪞 Claude shows limited ‘self-awareness’

Image source: Reve / The Rundown

The Rundown: Anthropic researchers published a 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 details:

• Specific concepts (like "loudness" or "bread") were implanted into Claude's processing, with the AI correctly noticing something unusual 20% of the time.

• When shown written text and given injected "thoughts," Claude was able to accurately repeat what it read while separately identifying the planted concept.

• Models adjusted internally when instructed to "think about" specific words while writing, showing some deliberate control over their processing patterns.

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

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• ⚙️ Cursor 2.0 - New interface to code with up to 8 agents in parallel

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

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

• 🎥 Character Cameos - Create custom characters in Sora 2

📰 Everything else in AI today

OpenAI is exploring an IPO for 2026 that could value it at up to $1T, with CEO Sam Altman saying it is “the most likely 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 find 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 company’s capabilities in image, video, animation, and VFX creation.

OpenAI released a 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 use NotebookLM Pro to keep me organized. I upload all the receipts and approval forms for the month into a single notebook, and then use it as I work through the charges. For example, I'll ask it: "Is there a transaction from September 14 in the files?" I tell my colleagues it's a super-charged search engine. No more sifting through dozens of PDF files looking for a single charge or coming up with hyper-specific file names.”

How do you use 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, like 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: Build PPTs with Claude Skills

See you soon,

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