What just happened? Remember the case of Michael Smith, the man who uploaded hundreds of thousands of AI-generated music tracks and used an army of over 1,000 bots to repeatedly stream them, conning music services out of $8 million? He's just been sentenced for his crime. He's going to prison for 18 months and has to forfeit the money, but it could have been worse.
According to court documents, Michael Smith, of Cornelius, North Carolina, worked with co-conspirators between 2017 and 2024 to fraudulently inflate plays of AI-generated music on Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Music, and YouTube.
To reduce the risk of detection, Smith spread the automated plays across hundreds of thousands of AI-generated tracks obtained from a co-conspirator. This kept individual songs from accumulating suspiciously large numbers of streams.
The music was uploaded under fictitious, AI-generated artist names, including Calm Baseball, Calm Connected, Calm Knuckles, Calliope Bloom, Calliope Erratum, Callous, and Callous Humane.
At its peak, the operation allegedly involved 52 cloud service accounts running 20 bot accounts apiece, totaling 1,040 bots. Smith estimated that each bot account could stream around 636 songs per day, producing 661,440 daily plays across the network. The bots connected to the streaming services through VPNs.
The Justice Department compared the number of streams Smith's AI-generated tracks were receiving to Taylor Swift's music. In April 2023, the singer's entire catalog received 9.3 million streams on YouTube Music from family plan accounts, while Smith's tracks were streamed 80.9 million times during the same period. The tracks accumulated billions of streams over the years they were available on the services, generating more than $8 million in royalties.
Smith was charged with wire fraud conspiracy, wire fraud, and money laundering conspiracy in September 2024. He pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud in March 2026.
Smith faced up to five years behind bars, so the sentence could have been considerably harsher. In addition to the prison term, he was ordered to forfeit $8,091,843.64 and serve two years of supervised release.
An interesting element of this case is that the Justice Department's announcement is one of the first official government documents to use the term "super intelligence" instead of artificial intelligence. It appears six times in the document.
President Trump signed an executive order during White House tech summit last week instructing US government departments and agencies to use "super intelligence," or "SI," instead of artificial intelligence. The order said SI will take the place of AI in "official correspondence," websites, reports and other forms of communication.