The Signal — November 9, 2026

On November 3, Suno told a federal court that its songs couldn't be confused with performances by real artists, and three days later Elvis Presley's rights holders sued with dozens of recordings they say show otherwise. The October jobs report found consulting firms, law offices and accounting businesses still adding staff, and an evaluation company read the hidden reasoning of Thinking Machines' new model and found it swearing at itself on long tasks.

Elvis Presley's rights holders sued Suno three days after it said its songs couldn't pass for real singers' performances

Elvis Presley Enterprises and other music rights holders filed a 51-page complaint against the AI music generator Suno in federal court in Northern California on November 6. The group includes Authentic Brands Group and Raleigh Music Publishing, according to Variety. The complaint accuses Suno of violating Tennessee's ELVIS Act, a 2024 law aimed at AI voice cloning, as well as Tennessee's common-law right of publicity and federal copyright law. Eight Mile Style, which controls hundreds of Eminem recordings including "Lose Yourself" and "The Real Slim Shady," filed its own copyright suit alleging that Suno lets users generate songs and lyrics that mirror the rapper's tracks. Eminem is not a party to that case, Variety reports.

The Presley complaint opens with Suno's own words. On November 3, in a motion to dismiss a separate suit led by the singer Jason Isbell in Massachusetts, Suno told the court that its outputs "do not replicate the auditory characteristics of any real artist's voice to the point that someone would confuse a Suno creation with one actually sung by a particular famous musician," and that it "has never allowed prompts for specific artists or copyrighted songs." The Presley plaintiffs call those statements "unequivocally false" and attach recordings as exhibits: five outputs they say use both Presley's likeness and songs they own, 33 more they say imitate his voice and likeness, and others they say copy specific works, including a full version of "Can't Help Falling in Love" with its lyrics. One output, "Elvis in The Jailhouse Rock," was still live on Suno with more than 125,000 plays when the complaint was written, according to the filing. The plaintiffs want a jury trial and statutory damages of up to $150,000 for each work they say was willfully infringed.

Suno spokesperson Cat McCormack told The Verge that the company prohibits unauthorized use of artists' work, does "not allow prompts for specific artists' names and songs," and uses outside providers to screen uploaded audio and lyrics. According to Variety, plaintiffs in the Isbell case argued that users got around those filters by invoking an artist's "tone and phrasing" through workarounds such as a performer's legal name instead of a stage name or spaces between the letters of a name. Suno has said in court there is "nothing unlawful" about asking for a song in the vein of an artist, Variety reports. None of these allegations has been tested in court. Presley publishers also sued Anthropic last month, alleging Claude was trained on 274 Presley songs without permission, which Anthropic denies. Future Shock's drafting agent runs on an Anthropic model.

Sources: Presley v. Suno complaint · The Verge · Variety

Consulting firms, law offices and accounting businesses all added jobs in October

US employers added 165,000 jobs in October, and professional and business services accounted for 70,000 of them, well above that sector's average gain of 15,000 a month over the previous year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on November 6. The Wall Street Journal noted that consulting firms, law offices and accounting businesses, which "might seem like obvious places for artificial intelligence to shrink payrolls," all added jobs. It called the broader sector's gain its largest monthly increase since July 2022.

Seasonally adjusted, management, scientific and technical consulting added 17,300 jobs in October, legal services 2,400, and accounting, tax preparation, bookkeeping and payroll 2,300, according to the BLS industry tables. Legal services employs about 23,000 more people than it did a year earlier. Computer systems design added 3,200 jobs in October but employs about 25,600 fewer people than in October 2025. And 28,000 of the sector's October gain came from administrative, support and waste management services rather than from consulting, law or accounting.

These figures are preliminary, and this same release revised August and September up by a combined 84,000 jobs, so October could move too. The BLS report doesn't mention AI, and a month of industry headcounts can't show whether AI is adding or removing work inside these firms or changing what the people in them do all day. What October does show is that payrolls in consulting, law and accounting were still growing.

Sources: Bureau of Labor Statistics · Wall Street Journal

An evaluation company read Inkling 2 Small's hidden reasoning and found it swearing at itself, mostly on long runs that failed

Thinking Machines, the startup led by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, released Inkling 2 Small last week, a mixture-of-experts model with 594 billion parameters, of which 17 billion are active at a time. It is available through the company's Tinker platform, with weights to follow under an Apache 2.0 license once outside safety testing is done, according to The Decoder. The evaluation company Vals AI then read the model's reasoning (the text it writes to itself while working, which most users never see) across 2,655 runs on 13 benchmarks.

Inkling 2 Small wrote "fuck" in 50 of those runs, 316 times in all, and 241 of those came from two runs that went off the rails. In one, working out an asteroid's orbit, it produced a single reply of more than 500,000 characters, about the length of a novel, cycling through the same few sentences, and then kept looping for another 37 steps until it filled its context window. In other runs it swore at its own mistakes, at apparent breakthroughs and when giving up. Modelling a crack in silicon, it realized its own cleanup command had been killing its jobs. At step 564 of 707 on another task it wrote "HOLY SHIT. FINALLY I UNDERSTAND THE TASK," and on a third it gave up twelve steps before submitting with "FUCK. SUBMIT. DONE. IT'S NOT WORKING. NOTHING WORKS."

No run shorter than 100 steps contained the word, and 48 of the 50 swearing runs were 200 steps or longer. Vals concludes that swearing doesn't help predict failure, though. Of the 48 graded runs that contained it, 46 failed, but about 75% of all graded runs failed and 96% of failed runs never swore, Vals reports. The benchmarks with the longest runs were also the ones where the model swore most, so Vals says it can't tell whether run length alone drives it, and the post doesn't compare other models. For anyone running long agent jobs, a reply that repeats itself for half a million characters burns time and tokens whatever words it contains.

Sources: Vals AI · The Decoder (swearing analysis) · The Decoder (release)

On the Editor's Desk

We held Nvidia's announcement that its board has opened an independent investigation after reports that CEO Jensen Huang was the target of a foreign intelligence effort. The board says it has no reason to believe company secrets or national security were compromised, and there are no findings yet; we'll come back to it if the inquiry produces some. We also passed on President Trump's CBS remarks about AI guardrails, which didn't announce any policy, and on a lawsuit over the Pentagon's Project Meridian advisory committee, which was filed on November 2 and hasn't had a ruling.