Man who made $8 million using AI-generated songs and an army of streaming bots gets 18 months in prison

Michael Smith, a man from Cornelius, North Carolina, has been sentenced to 18 months in prison and ordered to forfeit $8.09 million after being convicted for his role in a fraud scheme involving AI-generated music. Over a period of seven years, Smith and his co-conspirators uploaded hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs to music platforms including Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Music, and YouTube.

To avoid detection, they spread the automated streams across thousands of tracks, which were uploaded under fictitious names. At its peak, the operation involved 1,040 bots spread across 52 cloud service accounts, each generating around 636 streams per day. The Justice Department compared the number of streams Smith's tracks received to Taylor Swift's entire catalog.

Smith pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud in March 2026 after initially being charged in September 2024. In addition to his prison term, he was required to serve two years of supervised release. This case marks the first official government use of the term "super intelligence" in a legal document.