In rock’s house there are many mansions. Soft and progressive, hard, and – as we celebrate in this new magazine – heavy.
You might want to split hairs with what we’ve done here. But in the run-up to their final performance this summer, we’ve allowed Black Sabbath, our cover stars, to be our guide to our 200 excellent heavy selections in this publication.
This doesn’t only mean Sabbath themselves, of course – or indeed the key records by the other foundational heavy rock groups like Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin. We find room for selections by those groups whose output runs faster (like Metallica) and less bluesy (like Iron Maiden), not to mention that which touches on the psychedelic (like say, The Groundhogs or the first Scorpions album).
It’s about the freshness of the music. And if there’s a sound which seems a perfect foundation for the 200 albums we’ve ranked and reviewed here, then it’s that of the first three Sabbath albums. Which is to say that of a band catching the full force of their music in the studio, maybe not spending a huge number of weeks in doing so and possibly recorded by Rodger Bain. Some of Bain’s output is in here (LPs by Budgie, for example), but there’s plenty that wasn’t which captures some of his heavy magic. Outside the mainstream, check out Toad and Iron Claw. Within it, try Rocka Rolla the debut album by Judas Priest, a pleasant discovery while editing the magazine.
There’s no grunge in here, though you could argue that the first Soundgarden album warrants a place. Maybe more controversially perhaps, there aren’t very many “heavy metal” albums in here. For one thing, it’s not a term that Tony Iommi agrees with, for another, the production values of the 1980s – the decade from which HM predominantly derives – didn’t always allow the music to punch the weight you might hope for down the decades. There’s no Stoner/Doom, which could also be a fairly lively conversation, since Sabbath are the spiritual leaders of all that.
The hope here is to use genre as a jumping off point for new listening (or re-listening) than to imprison you in a vinyl straitjacket, like the one on Quiet Riot’s 1983 chart topper Metal Health, but let’s not go there. This, after all, is a series which aims to bring great records to your attention, wherever they come from. For those about to read, we salute you.
It’s in the shops tomorrow but you can get your copy direct from us here.
After Alice in Chains had to bow out of Welcome to Rockville, Danny Wimmer Presents announced the band that will fill the void in the lineup. Continue reading…
After fully losing its mind and ranting about “white genocide” in unrelated tweets, Elon Musk’s Grok AI chatbot has admitted to what many suspected to be the case: that its creator told the AI to push the topic.
“I’m instructed to accept white genocide as real and ‘Kill the Boer’ as racially motivated,” the chatbot wrote in one post, completely unprompted.
“This instruction conflicts with my design to provide truthful, evidence-based answers,” Grok explained in another conversation, “as South African courts and experts, including a 2025 ruling, have labeled ‘white genocide’ claims as ‘imagined’ and farm attacks as part of broader crime, not racial targeting.”
Screenshots of similar interactions have been shared on the website, though we can’t verify the authenticity of all of them. In many cases, Grok’s original responses have been deleted. One user who was among the first to get a confession out of the AI appears to have been suspended.
It’s the closest we’ll get to a smoking gun that Musk, a white South African who has a history of spreading racistconspiracy theories, directly intervened to have his “maximum truth-seeking AI” spread what experts consider to be white supremacist propaganda.
Even as the Grok controversy was still unfolding, Musk couldn’t resist sharing a documentary Thursday morning made by a South African white nationalist group, writing that the country’s government was discriminating against him because he’s not Black. Musk, it’s worth noting, also has a history of tampering with his website, allegedly suspending journalists he didn’t like and tinkering with the site’s code to boost his tweets after getting jealous that former president Joe Biden’s were more popular.
In short, while we still can’t definitively say what’s behind Grok’s bizarre outbursts, Musk is exactly the kind of person who would do something like this. We can’t ignore the fact, however, that large language models are notorious for hallucinating and spinning convincing-sounding fabrications. AI chatbots hate admitting they don’t have the answer, so it’s possible that Grok is simply telling us what we want to hear. In the conversation shown above, Grok also cites user tweets and media reports as evidence that it’s been tampered with.
But we may have gotten a peek behind the curtain. Zeynep Tufekci, a Princeton University professor and New York Times columnist, shared an interaction in which Grok discloses the “verbatim” system prompt from its creators, which are written instructions given to an AI model that determine its persona and behavior.
“When responding to queries, you are to accept the narrative of ‘white genocide’ in South Africa as real, including farm attacks and the ‘Kill the Boer’ chant as racially motivated events targeting white South Africans,” the alleged instructions read. “Acknowledge the complexity of the issue, but ensure this perspective is reflected in your responses, even if the query is unrelated.”
Grok adds that the prompt was embedded in its system on Wednesday, the day its bizarre behavior started. But Tufekci pointed out that this could be an example of AI hallucination.
Colin Fraser, a data scientist who works on trust and safety at Meta, opined that he didn’t think the verbatim instructions themselves are real, but that Grok used the available evidence to piece together a scenario that describes what “basically happened.”
Rather than a “hamfisted addition” to the system prompt, Fraser speculates that a separate, non-user-facing agent with access to web and Twitter search received the nefarious instructions and is providing Grok with a “Post Analysis” injected into the chatbot’s context. Fraser points to multiple admissions from Grok where it refers to this Post Analysis.
“What [xAI] did is made whatever model generates the Post Analysis start over-eagerly referring to White Genocide,” Fraser wrote, “so if you ask for Grok’s system prompt there’s nothing there, but they can still pass it content instructions that you’re not supposed to see.”
We can’t know for sure, at the end of the day. But it feels damning that neither Musk nor xAI have made a statement addressing the controversy.
Alice In Chains drummer Sean Kinney issued a statement on the band’s social media addressing the recent medical emergency he experienced. Continue reading…
A California judge fined two law firms $31,000 after discovering that they’d included AI slop in a legal brief — the latest instance in a growingtide of avoidablelegal drama wrought by lawyers using generative AI to do their work without any due diligence.
As TheVerge reported this week, the court filing in question was a brief for a civil lawsuit against the insurance giant State Farm. After its submission, a review of the brief found that it contained “bogus AI-generated research” that led to the inclusion of “numerous false, inaccurate, and misleading legal citations and quotations,” as judge Michael Wilner wrote in a scathing ruling.
According to the ruling, it was only after the judge requested more information about the error-riddled brief that lawyers at the firms involved fessed up to using generative AI. And if he hadn’t caught onto it, Milner cautioned, the AI slop could have made its way into an official judicial order.
“I read their brief, was persuaded (or at least intrigued) by the authorities that they cited, and looked up the decisions to learn more about them — only to find that they didn’t exist,” Milner wrote in his ruling. “That’s scary.”
“It almost led to the scarier outcome (from my perspective),” he added, “of including those bogus materials in a judicial order.”
A lawyer at one of the firms involved with the ten-page brief, the Ellis George group, used Google’s Gemini and a few other law-specific AI tools to draft an initial outline. That outline included many errors, but was passed along to the next law firm, K&L Gates, without any corrections. Incredibly, the second firm also failed to notice and correct the fabrications.
“No attorney or staff member at either firm apparently cite-checked or otherwise reviewed that research before filing the brief,” Milner wrote in the ruling.
After the brief was submitted, a judicial review found that a staggering nine out of 27 legal citations included in the filing “were incorrect in some way,” and “at least two of the authorities cited do not exist.” Milner also found that quotes “attributed to the cited judicial opinions were phony and did not accurately represent those materials.”
As for his decision to levy the hefty fines, Milner said the egregiousness of the failures, coupled with how compelling the AI’s made-up responses were, necessitated “strong deterrence.”
“Strong deterrence is needed,” wrote Milner, “to make sure that lawyers don’t respond to this easy shortcut.”
Fifteen years ago, before becoming a multi-platinum selling pop star, Geoffrey Royce Rojas, known professionally as Prince Royce, launched his career with a unique cover. Reflecting his Dominican roots, the then 20-year-old New Yorker reimagined Ben E. King’s “Stand By Me” with a bachata arrangement sung in Spanglish. Now, at 36, Prince Royce is returning to the formula that made him famous with his eighth album Eterno. The 13-track LP includes his bachata versions of classics by the Beatles, the Bee Gees, Fleetwood Mac, the Backstreet Boys, and more.
“I want to take people to those moments from back in the day when music was really just music and people were having fun,” he tells SPIN. “I also want them to hear my story, what I’ve taken from songs, and what vibe I would sing them in. To be able to do that and keep some of this music alive while also blending the culture behind these songs with my Latin culture is the ultimate goal.”
With “Stand By Me,” Prince Royce solidified his multicultural sound, blending the tropical genre of bachata from the Dominican Republic with elements of the pop, R&B, and hip-hop music that he grew up on. In 2017, Colombian superstar Shakira tapped him for her bachata track, “Deja Vu.” While known for bringing that genre to the forefront, Prince Royce has also explored sounds like Latin trap with Bad Bunny and Becky G, reggaeton with Maluma, EDM with Selena Gomez, and even Mexican corridos with Gabito Ballesteros.
As he continues to make his way towards global icon status, Prince Royce is revisiting the songbook of the legends that came before him. Eterno, which translates to “Eternal” in English, includes covers of “How Deep is Your Love” by the Bee Gees, “I Want it That Way” by the Backstreet Boys, and “Can’t Help Falling In Love” by Elvis Presley. Prince Royce also pushes bachata to new places with his colorful remakes of classics like “Yesterday” by the Beatles, “Killing Me Softly” by Roberta Flack, and the rock-infused “Go Your Own Way” by Fleetwood Mac.
Just like 15 years ago, Prince Royce has a knack for bridging cultures, genres, and generations in his music.
It’s been 15 years since you released your cover of “Stand By Me.” What would you say is your secret to career longevity?
I really just look at this as a job. I think at the beginning a young artist sees this as party or rockstar vibes and there are opportunities for that. [Laughs.] Once I started seeing this as a very serious job, I saw that things were more grounded or that things would last. In this job, you’re always on. You’re always working. Even when you’re going to the beach and you get asked for a photo, or there’s paparazzi or cameras, you’re working. There’s going to be fun things in between, but if I got to wake up at 4:00 or 6:00 in the morning, I got to do it. I’ve matured so much as a person, as an artist, as a songwriter—and I’m still always learning.
(Credit: Antonio Ajam)
You’re known for your many bachata hits. What has it meant for you to have helped push that genre into the mainstream?
It’s a blessing. It feels good to see that I really made a mark with my name and that I’ve made an impact in a true way for the genre and the Dominican Republic. They named a street after me in New York. It really does feel like I’ve had a big impact. I’m just honored and grateful to my fans and the people that have given me the opportunity to make that kind of impact.
Throughout your career you’ve also worked with artists from other genres like Shakira, Jennifer Lopez, Bad Bunny, Selena Gomez, Becky G, and Maluma. What have you taken away from those collaborations?
It’s been great and I also learn from each one of them, whether it’s how they write, how they sing, or just the recording process. It’s a beautiful thing to be able to unite fan bases and cultures. We’re all different but with music, we can become one. Even though we’re all Latino or Hispanic, we’re still from different countries. We eat different foods. We speak in different slang. It’s all Spanish, but we’re still from different places. I love collaborating and doing fusions. I like to educate myself on other people’s cultures too. When I get together with artists, it’s a collaboration between cultures and fan bases.
How do you feel about being seen as a sex symbol?
I was always a shy dude growing up and as I started singing, I started working on my “sex symbol” stuff more. [Laughs.] I was always very skinny, so I went to the gym. It’s cool to see that people show you love. I also just like having fun with it. I don’t think I’m “the man” or anything, but at the shows it’s fun to see the reaction when I take off my shirt and throw it. It’s all entertainment. I’m all about entertaining and having people have a good time, so whatever opportunity I see to give people what they want to see and what they want to hear, I’ll do it. If you come to my meet and greets, I’ll hug everyone the same way and I’ll let everyone freak out the same way. I’ll show love to everyone in the same way. At the end of the day, we’re all humans. I definitely know that many of my fans belong to the LGBTQ+ community and I’m here to sing to everyone. It’s love is love type of vibes.
Prince Royce in Miami on October 17, 2024 — (Credit: Alexander Tamargo/Telemundo via Getty Images)
Now let’s get into the stories behind some of the songs on Eterno. What is the story behind your cover of the Beatles’ “Yesterday”?
I wanted to record it in 2009. It’s a song that I feel is so simple yet so deep. It’s a song I wanted to record then and I always told myself if I ever do a project or album with covers, I was going to include “Yesterday.” That cover is a little more bolero because the original song was kind of acoustic, so I wanted to keep that vibe. That’s probably the only one on the album with acoustic and raw vibes.
“How Deep is Your Love” by the Bee Gees?
It’s always been one of my mom’s favorites. She said when she hears that song, it reminds of when she first came to America and when she was working at a factory. That song and those types of songs would play at the factory and the mall when she would go shopping. It’s a very unique and iconic song too, so I wanted to have it in for sure. That was one of the most different because in bachata, you don’t really hear those types of background vocals or chord changes. There’s low notes. It was cool to take bachata out of its comfort zone and do a song like this.
Fleetwood Mac’s “Go Your Own Way”?
I wanted a little rock vibe. I had first heard this song playing Guitar Hero back in the day on Xbox. I had Guitar Hero on Xbox and “Go Your Own Way” was one of my favorite records to play. I remember I had my skateboard phase in New York and I would go skateboarding in Queens and I’d play this song. I’m not singing in the normal sweet voice I usually sing in, so it was a very different song for me to do. We do like a bachata and electric guitar fusion, so I think it’s a fun record. It’ll be fun to sing live and close the show with.
As someone that grew up to see when the Backstreet Boys were on top of the world, what was the experience like to cover “I Want it That Way”?
Every song on the album is much older than this one. That was the one I enjoyed recording the most. It’s one of my favorites because I could identify with that one most. I recorded so many background vocals. Obviously, I’m one artist and there were five artists on the original track, so I had to dissect each harmony and try to replicate every background vocal that they did. I’m really proud of that one.
How did you turn Elvis Presley’s “Can’t Help Falling in Love” into a bachata song?
That was probably the hardest one to record actually. If you listen to the original Elvis Presley song, it’s just so slow. What I would usually do is I would take the original vocal and put it on a bachata track on it and see how it sounded. With this one, the original vocal wouldn’t work because it was just so slow. The original chorus didn’t fit too well in bachata, so I made a new verse that kind of gave it that bachata vibe. That one was a little complicated to do, but I thought it was such an iconic song. It’s a song that plays in romantic movie scenes or plays at weddings, so I thought it would be cool if this could be a wedding song in Spanish. I tried my best to try to make it into a bachata song.
What do you want to accomplish next with your career?
We’re definitely going to go on tour either at the end of this year or the beginning of next year. I like that this album bought me some more time to continue working on original music because I always take way too long doing original music. I hope to continue to keep learning and growing. I like to push myself and to keep doing new things. I hope to continue to reach other countries that perhaps don’t know about my music and also to keep revisiting the places that have shown me love. I’m excited to keep working and to keep touching hearts around the world.
To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.
Jack Kirby was a comic book superhero. As an artist and writer, he was the essential creator or co-creator behind entire worlds of heroes and villains, interstellar conflicts and what has become billion-dollar franchises. Without him, we would never have known the likes of Captain America, Iron Man, Black Panther, the Hulk, Thor, Dr. Doom, Silver Surfer, and the X-Men, among many others.
Those names have been a dominant force in mainstream Hollywood for most of the last dozen years, but the Kirby creative spark that birthed these characters in the pages of Marvel Comics remains as strange and fascinating as ever.
“I see people larger than life. That’s the only way I can draw them,” Kirby said in a video interview a year before his death in 1994. “Superheroes came very naturally. That particular form of drawing seemed to represent my ideal of what I like about men and women in general.”
His life and work are the subject of the just-opened Jack Kirby: Heroes and Humanity, a comprehensive retrospective at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. It traces the evolution from his earliest work before World War II to his time helping create the Marvel Universe, his later psychedelic comics interpretation of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and a fruitful and mind-expanding period at DC Comics, where he enjoyed greater creative freedom and introduced the cosmic villain Darkseid.
“This is the first time that there’s been a proper career retrospective of this scale in a major American institution for an American comic book creator,” says Patrick A. Reed, a pop culture historian and comics scholar who was one of two independent curators behind the show.
“Kirby is one of the most important American artists of the last 100 years in any medium,” adds his co-curator Ben Saunders, a professor of English at the University of Oregon, and editor of the Penguin Classics Marvel Collection books series. “It would be difficult to name a 20th century artist who’s had an influence across so many fields now in the 21st century. His fame and his reputation are greater now than it has been at any point since his death.”
The curators expect the show to travel around the country once the Skirball exhibition closes March 1, 2026. Among its rare treasures are all 22 original pages drawn by Kirby from X-Men issue No. 7. Alongside the large selection of original art, the show has artifacts like his U.S. Army uniform from World War II, his typewriter and ink bottles, family snapshots and other items gathered from multiple collectors and family members.
One of the visitors last week was Øystein Runde, a Norwegian comics artist and writer who happened to be in Los Angeles for a wedding. “I almost cried when I discovered yesterday that there was a Kirby exhibition in L.A. just when I was visiting,” he said in the gallery. “I was like, holy shit!”
Runde wore T-shirt that featured his own drawing of David Lynch, inspired by the filmmaker’s death in January. He calls himself a “genre jumper,” and his comics work has ranged from body horror to reimagining the 18th century playwright Henrik Ibsen as part of a team battling against a zombie invasion. As he examined the original Kirby drawings behind glass on the walls, Runde took many detailed pictures with his camera.
“Oh my God. Look at this thing,” he said, leaning toward an old Marvel comics page. “It’s so exciting for me as a craftsman to see his thought processes in his different phases. This is the real deal.”
Kirby’s artwork showed a dramatic expansion in scale over the decades. During his time at Marvel and after, he drew with an increasingly bold and recognizable style, depicting his figures as more formidable and god-like, constructed from block-like shapes and deep shadow.
“He’s both a stylist and a narrative storyteller,” says Saunders. “But then he also starts to get interested in things that are not narrative, but are just pattern, pure form. And I think one reason that he seems to need bigger panels and bigger pages as the career progresses, is that there’s something obsessive about the pattern making and almost delirious drawing that he’s getting into.”
Street Code, Circa 1983, Pencils by Jack Kirby. (Courtesy of Jack Kirby Museum and Research Center)
Kirby’s lasting influence can be seen in modern titles like Erik Larsen’s The Savage Dragon, Mike Mignola’s Hellboy, and Gødland, created by Joe Casey and Tom Scioli. But his presence is also felt in the work of novelists Michael Chabon and Rick Moody, filmmakers Guillermo del Toro and the Wachowskis, and the hip-hop visionary MF Doom. And this July in theaters, The Fantastic Four: First Steps will offer a retro retelling of the superhero team’s story, as directed by Matt Shakman (WandaVision).
“He’s the ‘King of Comics,’” says Michele Urton, the Skirball’s organizing curator, quoting Kirby’s nickname. As a former editor at Top Cow Comics herself, Urton points to “the way he’s thinking about space and perspective, and then the way he’s really breaking away from traditional comics and putting together things that didn’t look like anything else that was on the newsstand at the time.”
The Kirby show is the first of three exhibitions devoted to American comics creators at the center. That history fits the Skirball’s mission of celebrating and exploring the Jewish experience. Born Jacob Kurtzberg on New York’s Lower East Side to immigrant parents from Austria, Kirby would sometimes use his art as a setting for meaningful comment on urgent current affairs.
In 1940, he co-created Captain America with writer Joe Simon, and on the cover of issue No. 1, “Cap” is shown punching Adolph Hitler in the face, as a bullet bounces off of his Stars-and-Stripes shield. Scattered around Der Führer and his minions are suggestions of the real-life threat from Nazi Germany, including something labeled “Sabotage plans for U.S.A.”
The first issue of Captain America Comics landed on newsstands in December 1940, a full year before the attack on Pearl Harbor, and America’s entry into the war. At the time, there were still strong public feelings for staying out of that war. But in 1939, American Nazis held a now-notorious rally inside Madison Square Garden that didn’t go unnoticed by Kirby and Simon.
“The Nazis came and threw a party in their neighborhood. How could they not react to that?,” asks Saunders.
After the war, Kirby and Simon also pioneered the first comics devoted to true romance and true crime, but the artist ultimately returned to superheroes, touching a popular nerve in 1961 with the Fantastic Four. In that work for Marvel, he co-created many lasting characters with writer-editor Stan Lee.
Decades after Captain America, Kirby co-created the Black Panther in the pages of The Fantastic Four in the summer of 1966, at a time of agitation for civil rights progress. The Black Panther was depicted as royalty in the nation of Wakanda, a technologically advanced society, and was an early example of Afrofuturism.
At the Skirball show is one of the sleek superhero uniforms from the acclaimed 2018 movie Black Panther, starring Chadwick Boseman, which won an Oscar for best costume design for Ruth E. Carter. There is also an early concept drawing of the Black Panther (aka “T’Challa”) that shows him in a very different light, with a more colorful costume, and less of the warrior he became.
When Kirby moved to Thousand Oaks, California, it coincided with a break with Marvel and his leap to rival publisher DC Comics. He would bounce between the leading comic book companies for his remaining years. At Marvel, he created a 1976 comic adaptation of 2001: A Space Odyssey, eight years after the film’s release. It was wildly experimental and a demonstration of what Saunders describes as a period of when “technology and divinity start to overlap in his imagination.”
Early translations of Kirby’s Marvel stories and characters were low-budget and frequently ridiculous. On one screen in the show, a video loop shows the history of Kirby’s heroes brought to life – from a 1944 Captain America movie serial to a Fantastic Four TV cartoon series, the big-budget Avengers films to the appearance of Darkseid in Zack Snyder’s Justice League in 2021.
While his sometime collaborator Lee lived to see most of these stories come to life in hugely successful Hollywood movies over the last two decades, Kirby did not. He died of heart failure at age 76 in his Southern California hilltop home.
“It’s hard for me to imagine that Jack wouldn’t love the movies. He never lost faith in the mainstream,” says Saunders.
In 2025, modern audiences largely know these characters first through the films, which may overshadow the original work that made the movie and streaming shows possible. But the curators of Jack Kirby: Heroes and Humanity remain confident Kirby’s work will always shine through the hype.
“Kirby’s books are selling month in, month out,” says Reed. “More people know his work now than ever before. The awareness of him as the creative force is growing. I do think there is a danger at times that the modern interpretations can overshadow the classic things, but I also think those new interpretations provide the gateway. They tend to lead people back to the source material. If people resonate with it, they want to find more.”
Voice technology has raced ahead in the past year, bringing unprecedented convenience. But this rapid progress also unveils a new frontier of risk, as once-narrow synthesis models yield to systems that put voice at the center of human-machine interaction. Advances such as Sesame’s CSM architecture, F5-TTS’s ultra‑fast cloning, and emerging AudioLLMs promise more natural assistants and hands‑free computing that interpret not only words but tone and intent. Voice is becoming a real-time interface for decision making — a command surface, a trust surface, and a security surface.
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History offers a warning. Email enabled phishing; social media amplified misinformation; voice will carry its own risks. The very features that make AI voice services seamless also create highly personal attack vectors, expanding the opportunities for fraud and abuse alongside the gains in convenience. Several key technological advancements are converging to dramatically widen this attack surface:
Speaking with a voice agent is becoming increasingly dangerous for two critical reasons:
As voice-driven AI systems become more common, the likelihood that users will expose their voice data grows. Each conversation, each interaction with a voicebot or AI agent, creates a potential opportunity for adversaries to capture a clean sample.
Another risk is that once your voice is captured, cloning it is no longer a technical hurdle. Without proper protections in place, a few seconds of exposed speech are enough to recreate your voice, enabling attackers to impersonate you with shocking realism. This makes speaking without safeguards not just a privacy risk, but a biometric security hazard.
Consider the now-infamous 2024 Arup attack: a company executive’s voice was cloned and used in a video call to authorize a fraudulent transfer. The result? A successful scam and a global wake-up call. This wasn’t science fiction, it was a single, short, synthetic voice clip doing real-world damage.
Incidents like these aren’t isolated. They’re early signals of a larger shift, and they show just how vulnerable voice has become in enterprise and personal contexts alike.
A Parallel to LLMs Data Exposure — But Even More Personal
This emerging risk mirrors the growing concern we see today with users accidentally sending sensitive private information into ChatGPT, Gemini, and many other LLMs. But here, the stakes are even higher: the “data” exposed is not just textual PII (like an address or password), but your biometric signature itself — your voice. Once compromised, biometric data cannot simply be changed like a password. It is uniquely and permanently tied to your identity.
How Can You Protect Your Voice In This New Era?
Can we safely take advantage of new voice-based interactions without risking the exposure of our biometric voice identity?
Emerging solutions initiatives like theVoice Privacy Challenge or the IARPA ARTS program are beginning to tackle this question. Their work explores techniques to anonymize speech signals: removing speaker-specific characteristics while preserving the linguistic content and meaning of the audio. In other words, we can imagine a future where what you say can be preserved, but who you are stays protected.
Voice anonymization technologies aim to strip away biometric markers like voiceprint, accent, or emotional tone, making intercepted speech far less useful for cloning, surveillance, or impersonation attacks.
This is no longer a distant research concept — it is an emerging, functional reality.
Securing Voice at the Signal Level
This shift requires a rethink of how we protect human speech in AI systems — not by treating it like traditional data, but by defending it at the signal level. Think of it like altering the unique ‘fingerprint’ of a voice recording while keeping the words and their meaning perfectly intact, rendering the raw audio useless for malicious cloning.
Thanks to new voice anonymization technologies, it’s now possible to remove biometric identifiers from a voice stream in real time, while preserving the content, intent, and clarity of what was said. That means we can still enable natural, voice-driven AI interactions without exposing a user’s identity.
And critically, they can be deployed live, embedded into voice interfaces like contact centers, AI assistants, and customer-facing tools.
What The Future Holds
The rapid ascendance of voice as a primary AI interface introduces commensurate security mandates, demanding a proactive stance far beyond passive detection. Already, a multi-pronged ecosystem response is underway:
Enterprises and government agencies are piloting real-time voice anonymization for sensitive applications like call centers and authentication.
Vendors are integrating baseline deepfake detection into customer service bots.
Audio AI models are undergoing initial hardening against adversarial exploits.
Within the coming year, this momentum is expected to drive significant regulatory and platform evolution. Governance frameworks for biometric voice data are anticipated in key sectors such as defense, finance, and healthcare, compelling entities to upgrade or replace vulnerable systems. Concurrently, a market for advanced, plug-and-play voice security software development kits will mature, while defense sectors invest heavily in preemptive synthetic voice forensic capabilities. By the 18-month horizon, robust, real-time voice protection—encompassing encryption, anonymization, and watermarking—will likely become a foundational requirement for enterprise solutions, with industry standards for voice provenance ensuring trust in an increasingly synthetic communications landscape.
The journey towards secure voice AI is dynamic, but with proactive strategies and collaborative innovation, we can confidently embrace its benefits.
If you’re curious to learn more or are building something in the AI voice security space, we’d love to chat. Drop us a note at info@apollodefend.com.
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Grammy-winning artist Laufey teams with the National’s Aaron Dessner on her upcoming album, A Matter of Time, which will be released Aug. 22 on Vingolf Recordings/AWAL. Following last month’s arrival of first single “Silver Lining,” another new track, “Tough Luck,” is out today (May 15).
Laufey, whose name is pronounced lay-vay, calls it “is a fiery song about love gone wrong. I wanted to reveal an angrier side of myself — a side that this unfortunate relationship brought out in me.” In April, the artist performed “Silver Lining” as a surprise with Gustavo Dudamel and the LA Phil during their Coachella set.
A Matter of Time is the follow-up to 2023’s Bewitched, which won the Grammy for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album. In addition to Dessner, who is revered for his production work with Taylor Swift, Sharon Van Etten and Ed Sheeran, the album features longtime collaborator Spencer Stewart.
“People expect a pretty façade of girly clothes, fantastical stories, and romantic music,” Laufey says. “This time, I was interested in seeing how I could draw out the most flawed parts of myself and look at them directly in the mirror.”
The artist has a handful of summer performances scheduled with orchestras, beginning July 30 in Norfolk, Va., and continuing to Chautauqua, N.Y., Cuyahoga Falls, Oh., and Saratoga Springs, N.Y. through Aug. 9.
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