This is this week’s ForbesWomen newsletter, which every Thursday brings news about the world’s top female entrepreneurs, leaders and investors straight to your inbox. Click here to get on the newsletter list!

Earlier this week, Taylor Swift filed three new trademark applications to protect her voice and image, a move that was largely seen as a way to protect the Grammy winner against continued threats of AI misuse. Swift has been the subject of a bevy of unauthorized and AI-produced content over the years, and as Cynthia Katz, a music partner at law firm Fox Rothschild, explained to me in this Forbes Talks segment, Swift’s new trademark applications offer a playbook for other artists and public figures concerned about how artificial intelligence could be used to misrepresent their own names, images, likenesses and works.

Concerns about AI’s effect on art—and specifically, music—are not new to 2026. Two years ago, the three largest music labels filed lawsuits against two AI-music startups for allegedly copying songs to train their AI models. What’s made AI’s threat against the traditional music industry feel sharper today is the way consumers and former critics have begun to embrace the technology. To wit: Suno, one of the startups previously sued by those music labels, was in April the Apple App Store’s most downloaded music app (yep, it even beat Spotify) and is worth a cool $2.5 billion.

What does all of this mean for how music is produced? What will this do to the songs that score our workouts, commutes and dinner parties? As my colleague Rashi Shrivastava writes in her new profile of the Suno founders, this is an existential question that has no easy answer. But it’s a question I nonetheless posed........

© Forbes