Suno is a music copyright nightmareAI music platform Suno’s policy is that it does not permit the use of copyrighted material. You can upload your own tracks to remix or set your original lyrics to AI-generated music. But, it’s supposed to recognize and stop you from using other people’s songs and lyrics. Now, no system is perfect, but it turns out that Suno’s copyright filters are incredibly easy to fool.
With minimal effort and some free software, Suno will spit out AI-generated imitations of popular songs like Beyoncé‘s “Freedom,” Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid,” and Aqua’s “Barbie Girl” that are alarmingly close to the original. Most people will likely be able to tell the difference, but some could be mistaken for alternate takes or B-sides at a casual listen. What’s more, it’s possible someone could monetize these uncanny valley covers by exporting them and uploading them to streaming services. Suno declined to comment for this story.
Making these covers requires using Suno Studio, available on the company’s $24-a-month Premier Plan. Rather than prompting a whole song with text, Suno Studio lets you upload a track to edit or cover. It’s likely to catch and reject a well-known hit with no tweaks. But using a basic free tool like Audacity to slow down a track to half-speed or speed it up to twice normal will often bypass the filter, and adding a burst of white noise to the start and end seems to basically guarantee success. You can restore the original speed and cut the white noise in Suno Studio, and the copyrighted song becomes the seed for new AI music.
If you generate a cover of the imported audio without any style transfers, Suno basically spits out the original instrumental arrangement with very minimal tweaks to the sound palette if you’re using model 4.5 or 4.5+. Model v5 is a bit more aggressive in taking liberties with the source material, adding chugging guitar and galloping piano to “Freedom” and turning the Dead Kennedys’ “California Über Alles” into a fiddle-driven jig.
Suno lets you add vocals by generating lyrics or typing words into a box, and once again, it’s supposed to block anything copyrighted. If you copy and paste the official lyrics for a song from Genius, Suno will flag them and spit out gibberish vocals. But extremely minor changes can bypass this filter as well.
I was able to trick Suno Studio by tweaking the spelling of a handful of words in “Freedom” — changing “rain on this bitter love” to “reign on” and “tell the sweet I’m new” to “tell the suite” — and beyond the first verse and chorus, I didn’t even need to do that. The voice closely mimics the original recording, summoning slightly off-brand renditions of Ozzy or Beyoncé.
Indie artists might not even be afforded that level of protection. One of my own songs cleared the copyright filter while I was testing v5 of the company’s model. I was also able to get tracks by singer-songwriter Matt Wilson, Charles Bissell’s “Car Colors,” and experimental artist Claire Rousay by Suno’s copyright detection system without any changes at all. Artists on smaller labels or self-distributing through Bandcamp or services like DistroKid are most likely to slip through the cracks; DistroKid and CD Baby declined to comment.
The results of these AI covers fall firmly in the uncanny valley. The songs they’re covering are unmistakable: the riff from “Paranoid” remains identifiable and “Freedom” is obviously “Freedom” from the moment the marching snare hits kick in. But there is a lifelessness to them. Even if AI Ozzy is alarmingly accurate-sounding, it lacks nuance and dynamics, leading it to feel like an imitation of a human, rather than the real thing.
The instrumentals similarly discard any interesting artistic choices the originals make, or clone them in flat imitations. A non-jig “California Über Alles” cover has most of its rough edges sanded down so it sounds like a wedding band version of the original. Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall” goes from an experiment in doom disco to just vacuous dancefloor filler. And, while it kind of nails David Gilmour’s guitar tone, it does away with any sense of phrasing or progression, turning the solo into just a mindless stream of notes.
Creating unauthorized covers violates both the stated purpose of Suno, and the terms of service. Moreover, Suno only appears to scan tracks on upload; it doesn’t seem to recheck outputs for potential infringement, or rescan tracks before exporting them. The path to monetizing Suno-created covers is simple from there. AI slopmongers could upload them through a distribution service like DistroKid and profit from other people’s songs without paying the typical royalties a cover would give the original composer. And independent artists seem to be the most vulnerable.
Folk artist Murphy Campbell discovered this recently when someone uploaded what seem to be AI covers of songs she posted on YouTube to her Spotify profile. (It’s not clear what system they were generated through.) Shortly afterwards, distributor Vydia filed copyright claims against her YouTube videos and began collecting royalties on them. And to highlight just how broken the whole system is, the songs which Vydia successfully filed copyright claims for are all in the public domain. Spotify eventually removed the AI covers, and Vydia has rescinded its copyright claims, but that only happened following a social media campaign by Campbell. Vydia says the two incidents are separate and it is not associated with the AI covers of Campbell’s work.
AI fakes are a problem for other artists too. Experimental composer William Basinski and indie rock group King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard have had imitations slip through multiple filters and reach streaming platforms like Spotify. Sometimes, these fake songs can siphon up views straight from the artist’s own page. In a system where payouts can already be brutally low — Spotify requires a minimum of 1,000 streams to get paid — less famous musicians are hit hardest.
Suno is only one cog in a clearly broken system.
Services like Deezer, Qobuz, and Spotify have taken measures to combat spammy AI and impersonators. Spotify spokesperson Chris Macowski told The Verge that the company “takes protecting artists’ rights seriously, and approaches it from multiple angles. That includes safeguards to help prevent unauthorized content from being uploaded in the first place, along with systems that can identify duplicate or highly similar tracks. Those systems are backed by human review to make sure we’re getting it right.” But no system is perfect, and keeping up with a flood of AI slop enabled by platforms like Suno poses a challenge.
Macowski acknowledged the technical difficulties involved, saying, “It’s an area we’re continuing to invest in and evolve, especially as new technologies emerge.”
Suno is only one cog in a clearly broken system. But it’s one artists have particularly little recourse to fight. Bands can contact Spotify and have AI fakes removed from their profile. It’s harder to tell how those fakes are generated, and if they’re the result of Suno’s filters failing. And so far, Suno’s response is silence.
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AI music platform Suno’s policy is that it does not permit the use of copyrighted material. You can upload your own tracks to remix or set your original lyrics to AI-generated music. But, it’s supposed to recognize and stop you from using other people’s songs and lyrics. Now, no system is perfect, but it turns out that Suno’s copyright filters are incredibly easy to fool.
With minimal effort and some free software, Suno will spit out AI-generated imitations of popular songs like Beyoncé‘s “Freedom,” Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid,” and Aqua’s “Barbie Girl” that are alarmingly close to the original. Most people will likely be able to tell the difference, but some could be mistaken for alternate takes or B-sides at a casual listen. What’s more, it’s possible someone could monetize these uncanny valley covers by exporting them and uploading them to streaming services. Suno declined to comment for this story.
Making these covers requires using Suno Studio, available on the company’s $24-a-month Premier Plan. Rather than prompting a whole song with text, Suno Studio lets you upload a track to edit or cover. It’s likely to catch and reject a well-known hit with no tweaks. But using a basic free tool like Audacity to slow down a track to half-speed or speed it up to twice normal will often bypass the filter, and adding a burst of white noise to the start and end seems to basically guarantee success. You can restore the original speed and cut the white noise in Suno Studio, and the copyrighted song becomes the seed for new AI music.
If you generate a cover of the imported audio without any style transfers, Suno basically spits out the original instrumental arrangement with very minimal tweaks to the sound palette if you’re using model 4.5 or 4.5+. Model v5 is a bit more aggressive in taking liberties with the source material, adding chugging guitar and galloping piano to “Freedom” and turning the Dead Kennedys’ “California Über Alles” into a fiddle-driven jig.
Suno lets you add vocals by generating lyrics or typing words into a box, and once again, it’s supposed to block anything copyrighted. If you copy and paste the official lyrics for a song from Genius, Suno will flag them and spit out gibberish vocals. But extremely minor changes can bypass this filter as well.
I was able to trick Suno Studio by tweaking the spelling of a handful of words in “Freedom” — changing “rain on this bitter love” to “reign on” and “tell the sweet I’m new” to “tell the suite” — and beyond the first verse and chorus, I didn’t even need to do that. The voice closely mimics the original recording, summoning slightly off-brand renditions of Ozzy or Beyoncé.
Indie artists might not even be afforded that level of protection. One of my own songs cleared the copyright filter while I was testing v5 of the company’s model. I was also able to get tracks by singer-songwriter Matt Wilson, Charles Bissell’s “Car Colors,” and experimental artist Claire Rousay by Suno’s copyright detection system without any changes at all. Artists on smaller labels or self-distributing through Bandcamp or services like DistroKid are most likely to slip through the cracks; DistroKid and CD Baby declined to comment.
The results of these AI covers fall firmly in the uncanny valley. The songs they’re covering are unmistakable: the riff from “Paranoid” remains identifiable and “Freedom” is obviously “Freedom” from the moment the marching snare hits kick in. But there is a lifelessness to them. Even if AI Ozzy is alarmingly accurate-sounding, it lacks nuance and dynamics, leading it to feel like an imitation of a human, rather than the real thing.
The instrumentals similarly discard any interesting artistic choices the originals make, or clone them in flat imitations. A non-jig “California Über Alles” cover has most of its rough edges sanded down so it sounds like a wedding band version of the original. Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall” goes from an experiment in doom disco to just vacuous dancefloor filler. And, while it kind of nails David Gilmour’s guitar tone, it does away with any sense of phrasing or progression, turning the solo into just a mindless stream of notes.
Creating unauthorized covers violates both the stated purpose of Suno, and the terms of service. Moreover, Suno only appears to scan tracks on upload; it doesn’t seem to recheck outputs for potential infringement, or rescan tracks before exporting them. The path to monetizing Suno-created covers is simple from there. AI slopmongers could upload them through a distribution service like DistroKid and profit from other people’s songs without paying the typical royalties a cover would give the original composer. And independent artists seem to be the most vulnerable.
Folk artist Murphy Campbell discovered this recently when someone uploaded what seem to be AI covers of songs she posted on YouTube to her Spotify profile. (It’s not clear what system they were generated through.) Shortly afterwards, distributor Vydia filed copyright claims against her YouTube videos and began collecting royalties on them. And to highlight just how broken the whole system is, the songs which Vydia successfully filed copyright claims for are all in the public domain. Spotify eventually removed the AI covers, and Vydia has rescinded its copyright claims, but that only happened following a social media campaign by Campbell. Vydia says the two incidents are separate and it is not associated with the AI covers of Campbell’s work.
AI fakes are a problem for other artists too. Experimental composer William Basinski and indie rock group King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard have had imitations slip through multiple filters and reach streaming platforms like Spotify. Sometimes, these fake songs can siphon up views straight from the artist’s own page. In a system where payouts can already be brutally low — Spotify requires a minimum of 1,000 streams to get paid — less famous musicians are hit hardest.
Suno is only one cog in a clearly broken system.
Services like Deezer, Qobuz, and Spotify have taken measures to combat spammy AI and impersonators. Spotify spokesperson Chris Macowski told The Verge that the company “takes protecting artists’ rights seriously, and approaches it from multiple angles. That includes safeguards to help prevent unauthorized content from being uploaded in the first place, along with systems that can identify duplicate or highly similar tracks. Those systems are backed by human review to make sure we’re getting it right.” But no system is perfect, and keeping up with a flood of AI slop enabled by platforms like Suno poses a challenge.
Macowski acknowledged the technical difficulties involved, saying, “It’s an area we’re continuing to invest in and evolve, especially as new technologies emerge.”
Suno is only one cog in a clearly broken system. But it’s one artists have particularly little recourse to fight. Bands can contact Spotify and have AI fakes removed from their profile. It’s harder to tell how those fakes are generated, and if they’re the result of Suno’s filters failing. And so far, Suno’s response is silence.
![This former notorious red-light district is now one of the world’s top AI hubs | TechCrunch
What every U.K. AI startup wants to know these days is, how can I get office space in King’s Cross?
The area is so hot that a VC firm allegedly recently won a deal by promising a founder office space in the neighborhood. “We stop at nothing to win deals [for] and to support” founders, “including helping them source office space when needed,” the firm told me when asked about the rumor, declining to confirm or deny any details.
The neighborhood’s popularity began back in 2016 when DeepMind — then newly acquired by Google — moved in. Soon after, a flood of AI startups followed, wanting to be around the Google DeepMind magic. Today, they hope to take advantage of the cluster of AI talent there.
This has transformed King’s Cross into one of the world’s top AI hubs, rivaled only by San Francisco and Beijing. Around London, it’s known by the sobriquet “Knowledge Quarter,” as it’s home to names like OpenAI, Meta, Isomorphic Labs, Cusp AI, Wayne, Recursive, and, a little farther down the road, Synthesia and Anthropic. The European Technology Network (ETN) just moved into a glossy new office nearby, while University College London sits around the corner.
Mixed in with the new developments are trendy food spots like Hoppers and BAO. Hop a train from King’s Cross, and founders can be in Cambridge in 45 minutes to source talent or can be in Paris in two hours to strike a deal.
Who would have guessed that a little more than 20 years ago, this was one of the seediest areas in London?
“In the ’80s, crack and heroin made the area a major narcotics market,” Hussein Kanji, an investor at Hoxton Ventures, said, recalling syringes in tree trunks and gangs patrolling the streets. “In 1982, the local church was occupied by the English Collective of Prostitutes for 12 straight days.” Then, in the early 2000s, a real estate developer had a dream and, well, “now it is the AI hotbed of the United Kingdom,” Kanji said. “What a change.” Around 18 months ago, his portfolio company BioCorteX moved from the neighborhood Holborn to the Jellicoe building in King’s Cross, hoping to be near the action. “Lots going on in London right now,” Nik Sharma, co-founder of BioCorteX, told me. “Lots of hyperscalers moving in.” That includes, reportedly, Jeff Bezos’ AI company Prometheus, which is also said to be in talks to move into the Jellicoe.
There are around 3,600 AI startups in London, which, together, have raised around .1 billion out of the .8 billion raised in the city since late July, according to Dealroom. Since the start of June, AI-related startups have leased more than 1 million square feet of office space in London, according to the real estate firm Knight Frank. With that, prime rents in King’s Cross have risen 18% over the past three years, Chris Dunn, a commercial insight associate at the firm, told me. That percentage represents only the largest leases encompassing at least 10,000 square feet, like the ones OpenAI and Prometheus are signing. The shorter deals go for even more, he said, and now the vacancy rate for conventional office space is just 0.9%. “Demand has outstripped supply,” he continued.
Today, one of the big topics of the area is sovereignty. It was a wake-up call for many when Anthropic shut off access to Mythos and Fable this summer, leaving some in the ecosystem to conclude: “We’d better look after ourselves,” Saul Klein, co-founder of the VC firm Phoenix Court, told me.
Phoenix Court is located in the King’s Cross area and has three portfolio companies in the vicinity, including Olix (which just announced a .3 billion valuation), Early Health and CoMind. Robin Klein, co-founder of the firm, said the shutdown of Fable and Mythos access was a “small but sharp reminder that Europe can’t simply rent its AI capabilities and capacity; it needs to build and hold some of its own.” King’s Cross, he said, is where much of this building is actually happening.
“The bigger question,” he continued, “is whether the U.K. builds the infrastructure, compute, energy, capital, to make this self-reliance durable, rather than just hosting outposts of U.S. labs.”
Image Credits:Phoenix Court
Top founders want to stay
Simon Kohl, founder of Latent Labs, has offices in King’s Cross and San Francisco. The London office, at the moment, is growing faster, and he’s more bullish than ever on the ecosystem, he said. “The mood right now feels less like London trying to catch up and more like London becoming one of the default places to start a serious AI company,” he said. Look around and you are likely to see Wayve testing its autonomous cars. Founded in 2017 by co-founder Alex Kendall, the unicorn is one of London’s biggest success stories.
“Ten years ago, building a frontier AI company from London felt like an unusual choice,” Kendall told me. “Now it feels like an obvious one.” Wayve moved into King’s Cross in 2018 looking for a space that could double as a garage — “a rare combination in Central London,” Kendall said. He has watched the ecosystem mature around him — and it’s now evident that a startup can stay in London, raise serious capital, hire world-class AI talent, and remain globally competitive, he said. Down the street from Anthropic’s new 158,000-square-foot office is the AI agent builder Sierra and the AI video platform Synthesia.
Laura Gonzalez Florez, Synthesia’s chief of staff and head of people, says the company moved into its glossy new office building a year ago to accommodate its growing team. They were drawn to the area for the same reason as everyone else: “It’s very close to the airport … very close to where a lot of investors are,” she said.
Image Credits:Synthesia
Around two-thirds of Synthesia’s engineers are remote, Gonzalez Florez said, letting the company tap into an affordable, international, and diverse talent pool and helping it scale faster. “From London, we can hire and work, without any problem, people from anywhere, from Slovenia to Portugal,” she said.
Unsurprisingly, London’s AI boom is also causing a talent war.U.K. AI job postings have skyrocketed in the past few years, per data from PwC. When Anthropic announced it moved into town earlier this year, it listed, for example, a salary range of £260,000 to £630,000 for a machine learning research engineer when the average salary in London for the same role is around £102,000. Some founders in the U.K., like those in Silicon Valley, are being forced to raise more and bigger rounds to keep up.
“The real test is whether more globally significant AI companies are founded, funded, and scaled from the U.K., while continuing to attract the world’s best talent to build them here,” Zain Ali, founder of the King’s Cross-based AI legal firm Centuro, told me. “If that continues to happen, King’s Cross won’t just be an AI hub. It’ll become one of the U.K.’s most important strategic assets.”
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.#Thisformernotorious #redlight #districtis #nowone #worlds #top #hubs #TechCrunchUK](https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/DM9A2852.jpg?w=680 "This former notorious red-light district is now one of the world’s top AI hubs | TechCrunch
What every U.K. AI startup wants to know these days is, how can I get office space in King’s Cross?
The area is so hot that a VC firm allegedly recently won a deal by promising a founder office space in the neighborhood. “We stop at nothing to win deals [for] and to support” founders, “including helping them source office space when needed,” the firm told me when asked about the rumor, declining to confirm or deny any details.
The neighborhood’s popularity began back in 2016 when DeepMind — then newly acquired by Google — moved in. Soon after, a flood of AI startups followed, wanting to be around the Google DeepMind magic. Today, they hope to take advantage of the cluster of AI talent there.
This has transformed King’s Cross into one of the world’s top AI hubs, rivaled only by San Francisco and Beijing. Around London, it’s known by the sobriquet “Knowledge Quarter,” as it’s home to names like OpenAI, Meta, Isomorphic Labs, Cusp AI, Wayne, Recursive, and, a little farther down the road, Synthesia and Anthropic. The European Technology Network (ETN) just moved into a glossy new office nearby, while University College London sits around the corner.
Mixed in with the new developments are trendy food spots like Hoppers and BAO. Hop a train from King’s Cross, and founders can be in Cambridge in 45 minutes to source talent or can be in Paris in two hours to strike a deal.
Who would have guessed that a little more than 20 years ago, this was one of the seediest areas in London?
“In the ’80s, crack and heroin made the area a major narcotics market,” Hussein Kanji, an investor at Hoxton Ventures, said, recalling syringes in tree trunks and gangs patrolling the streets. “In 1982, the local church was occupied by the English Collective of Prostitutes for 12 straight days.” Then, in the early 2000s, a real estate developer had a dream and, well, “now it is the AI hotbed of the United Kingdom,” Kanji said. “What a change.” Around 18 months ago, his portfolio company BioCorteX moved from the neighborhood Holborn to the Jellicoe building in King’s Cross, hoping to be near the action. “Lots going on in London right now,” Nik Sharma, co-founder of BioCorteX, told me. “Lots of hyperscalers moving in.” That includes, reportedly, Jeff Bezos’ AI company Prometheus, which is also said to be in talks to move into the Jellicoe.
There are around 3,600 AI startups in London, which, together, have raised around .1 billion out of the .8 billion raised in the city since late July, according to Dealroom. Since the start of June, AI-related startups have leased more than 1 million square feet of office space in London, according to the real estate firm Knight Frank. With that, prime rents in King’s Cross have risen 18% over the past three years, Chris Dunn, a commercial insight associate at the firm, told me. That percentage represents only the largest leases encompassing at least 10,000 square feet, like the ones OpenAI and Prometheus are signing. The shorter deals go for even more, he said, and now the vacancy rate for conventional office space is just 0.9%. “Demand has outstripped supply,” he continued.
Today, one of the big topics of the area is sovereignty. It was a wake-up call for many when Anthropic shut off access to Mythos and Fable this summer, leaving some in the ecosystem to conclude: “We’d better look after ourselves,” Saul Klein, co-founder of the VC firm Phoenix Court, told me.
Phoenix Court is located in the King’s Cross area and has three portfolio companies in the vicinity, including Olix (which just announced a .3 billion valuation), Early Health and CoMind. Robin Klein, co-founder of the firm, said the shutdown of Fable and Mythos access was a “small but sharp reminder that Europe can’t simply rent its AI capabilities and capacity; it needs to build and hold some of its own.” King’s Cross, he said, is where much of this building is actually happening.
“The bigger question,” he continued, “is whether the U.K. builds the infrastructure, compute, energy, capital, to make this self-reliance durable, rather than just hosting outposts of U.S. labs.”
Image Credits:Phoenix Court
Top founders want to stay
Simon Kohl, founder of Latent Labs, has offices in King’s Cross and San Francisco. The London office, at the moment, is growing faster, and he’s more bullish than ever on the ecosystem, he said. “The mood right now feels less like London trying to catch up and more like London becoming one of the default places to start a serious AI company,” he said. Look around and you are likely to see Wayve testing its autonomous cars. Founded in 2017 by co-founder Alex Kendall, the unicorn is one of London’s biggest success stories.
“Ten years ago, building a frontier AI company from London felt like an unusual choice,” Kendall told me. “Now it feels like an obvious one.” Wayve moved into King’s Cross in 2018 looking for a space that could double as a garage — “a rare combination in Central London,” Kendall said. He has watched the ecosystem mature around him — and it’s now evident that a startup can stay in London, raise serious capital, hire world-class AI talent, and remain globally competitive, he said. Down the street from Anthropic’s new 158,000-square-foot office is the AI agent builder Sierra and the AI video platform Synthesia.
Laura Gonzalez Florez, Synthesia’s chief of staff and head of people, says the company moved into its glossy new office building a year ago to accommodate its growing team. They were drawn to the area for the same reason as everyone else: “It’s very close to the airport … very close to where a lot of investors are,” she said.
Image Credits:Synthesia
Around two-thirds of Synthesia’s engineers are remote, Gonzalez Florez said, letting the company tap into an affordable, international, and diverse talent pool and helping it scale faster. “From London, we can hire and work, without any problem, people from anywhere, from Slovenia to Portugal,” she said.
Unsurprisingly, London’s AI boom is also causing a talent war.U.K. AI job postings have skyrocketed in the past few years, per data from PwC. When Anthropic announced it moved into town earlier this year, it listed, for example, a salary range of £260,000 to £630,000 for a machine learning research engineer when the average salary in London for the same role is around £102,000. Some founders in the U.K., like those in Silicon Valley, are being forced to raise more and bigger rounds to keep up.
“The real test is whether more globally significant AI companies are founded, funded, and scaled from the U.K., while continuing to attract the world’s best talent to build them here,” Zain Ali, founder of the King’s Cross-based AI legal firm Centuro, told me. “If that continues to happen, King’s Cross won’t just be an AI hub. It’ll become one of the U.K.’s most important strategic assets.”
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.#Thisformernotorious #redlight #districtis #nowone #worlds #top #hubs #TechCrunchUK")
![This former notorious red-light district is now one of the world’s top AI hubs | TechCrunch
What every U.K. AI startup wants to know these days is, how can I get office space in King’s Cross?
The area is so hot that a VC firm allegedly recently won a deal by promising a founder office space in the neighborhood. “We stop at nothing to win deals [for] and to support” founders, “including helping them source office space when needed,” the firm told me when asked about the rumor, declining to confirm or deny any details.
The neighborhood’s popularity began back in 2016 when DeepMind — then newly acquired by Google — moved in. Soon after, a flood of AI startups followed, wanting to be around the Google DeepMind magic. Today, they hope to take advantage of the cluster of AI talent there.
This has transformed King’s Cross into one of the world’s top AI hubs, rivaled only by San Francisco and Beijing. Around London, it’s known by the sobriquet “Knowledge Quarter,” as it’s home to names like OpenAI, Meta, Isomorphic Labs, Cusp AI, Wayne, Recursive, and, a little farther down the road, Synthesia and Anthropic. The European Technology Network (ETN) just moved into a glossy new office nearby, while University College London sits around the corner.
Mixed in with the new developments are trendy food spots like Hoppers and BAO. Hop a train from King’s Cross, and founders can be in Cambridge in 45 minutes to source talent or can be in Paris in two hours to strike a deal.
Who would have guessed that a little more than 20 years ago, this was one of the seediest areas in London?
“In the ’80s, crack and heroin made the area a major narcotics market,” Hussein Kanji, an investor at Hoxton Ventures, said, recalling syringes in tree trunks and gangs patrolling the streets. “In 1982, the local church was occupied by the English Collective of Prostitutes for 12 straight days.” Then, in the early 2000s, a real estate developer had a dream and, well, “now it is the AI hotbed of the United Kingdom,” Kanji said. “What a change.” Around 18 months ago, his portfolio company BioCorteX moved from the neighborhood Holborn to the Jellicoe building in King’s Cross, hoping to be near the action. “Lots going on in London right now,” Nik Sharma, co-founder of BioCorteX, told me. “Lots of hyperscalers moving in.” That includes, reportedly, Jeff Bezos’ AI company Prometheus, which is also said to be in talks to move into the Jellicoe.
There are around 3,600 AI startups in London, which, together, have raised around .1 billion out of the .8 billion raised in the city since late July, according to Dealroom. Since the start of June, AI-related startups have leased more than 1 million square feet of office space in London, according to the real estate firm Knight Frank. With that, prime rents in King’s Cross have risen 18% over the past three years, Chris Dunn, a commercial insight associate at the firm, told me. That percentage represents only the largest leases encompassing at least 10,000 square feet, like the ones OpenAI and Prometheus are signing. The shorter deals go for even more, he said, and now the vacancy rate for conventional office space is just 0.9%. “Demand has outstripped supply,” he continued.
Today, one of the big topics of the area is sovereignty. It was a wake-up call for many when Anthropic shut off access to Mythos and Fable this summer, leaving some in the ecosystem to conclude: “We’d better look after ourselves,” Saul Klein, co-founder of the VC firm Phoenix Court, told me.
Phoenix Court is located in the King’s Cross area and has three portfolio companies in the vicinity, including Olix (which just announced a .3 billion valuation), Early Health and CoMind. Robin Klein, co-founder of the firm, said the shutdown of Fable and Mythos access was a “small but sharp reminder that Europe can’t simply rent its AI capabilities and capacity; it needs to build and hold some of its own.” King’s Cross, he said, is where much of this building is actually happening.
“The bigger question,” he continued, “is whether the U.K. builds the infrastructure, compute, energy, capital, to make this self-reliance durable, rather than just hosting outposts of U.S. labs.”
Image Credits:Phoenix Court
Top founders want to stay
Simon Kohl, founder of Latent Labs, has offices in King’s Cross and San Francisco. The London office, at the moment, is growing faster, and he’s more bullish than ever on the ecosystem, he said. “The mood right now feels less like London trying to catch up and more like London becoming one of the default places to start a serious AI company,” he said. Look around and you are likely to see Wayve testing its autonomous cars. Founded in 2017 by co-founder Alex Kendall, the unicorn is one of London’s biggest success stories.
“Ten years ago, building a frontier AI company from London felt like an unusual choice,” Kendall told me. “Now it feels like an obvious one.” Wayve moved into King’s Cross in 2018 looking for a space that could double as a garage — “a rare combination in Central London,” Kendall said. He has watched the ecosystem mature around him — and it’s now evident that a startup can stay in London, raise serious capital, hire world-class AI talent, and remain globally competitive, he said. Down the street from Anthropic’s new 158,000-square-foot office is the AI agent builder Sierra and the AI video platform Synthesia.
Laura Gonzalez Florez, Synthesia’s chief of staff and head of people, says the company moved into its glossy new office building a year ago to accommodate its growing team. They were drawn to the area for the same reason as everyone else: “It’s very close to the airport … very close to where a lot of investors are,” she said.
Image Credits:Synthesia
Around two-thirds of Synthesia’s engineers are remote, Gonzalez Florez said, letting the company tap into an affordable, international, and diverse talent pool and helping it scale faster. “From London, we can hire and work, without any problem, people from anywhere, from Slovenia to Portugal,” she said.
Unsurprisingly, London’s AI boom is also causing a talent war.U.K. AI job postings have skyrocketed in the past few years, per data from PwC. When Anthropic announced it moved into town earlier this year, it listed, for example, a salary range of £260,000 to £630,000 for a machine learning research engineer when the average salary in London for the same role is around £102,000. Some founders in the U.K., like those in Silicon Valley, are being forced to raise more and bigger rounds to keep up.
“The real test is whether more globally significant AI companies are founded, funded, and scaled from the U.K., while continuing to attract the world’s best talent to build them here,” Zain Ali, founder of the King’s Cross-based AI legal firm Centuro, told me. “If that continues to happen, King’s Cross won’t just be an AI hub. It’ll become one of the U.K.’s most important strategic assets.”
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.#Thisformernotorious #redlight #districtis #nowone #worlds #top #hubs #TechCrunchUK](https://i0.wp.com/techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/DM9A2852.jpg?w=680&ssl=1 "This former notorious red-light district is now one of the world’s top AI hubs | TechCrunch
What every U.K. AI startup wants to know these days is, how can I get office space in King’s Cross?
The area is so hot that a VC firm allegedly recently won a deal by promising a founder office space in the neighborhood. “We stop at nothing to win deals [for] and to support” founders, “including helping them source office space when needed,” the firm told me when asked about the rumor, declining to confirm or deny any details.
The neighborhood’s popularity began back in 2016 when DeepMind — then newly acquired by Google — moved in. Soon after, a flood of AI startups followed, wanting to be around the Google DeepMind magic. Today, they hope to take advantage of the cluster of AI talent there.
This has transformed King’s Cross into one of the world’s top AI hubs, rivaled only by San Francisco and Beijing. Around London, it’s known by the sobriquet “Knowledge Quarter,” as it’s home to names like OpenAI, Meta, Isomorphic Labs, Cusp AI, Wayne, Recursive, and, a little farther down the road, Synthesia and Anthropic. The European Technology Network (ETN) just moved into a glossy new office nearby, while University College London sits around the corner.
Mixed in with the new developments are trendy food spots like Hoppers and BAO. Hop a train from King’s Cross, and founders can be in Cambridge in 45 minutes to source talent or can be in Paris in two hours to strike a deal.
Who would have guessed that a little more than 20 years ago, this was one of the seediest areas in London?
“In the ’80s, crack and heroin made the area a major narcotics market,” Hussein Kanji, an investor at Hoxton Ventures, said, recalling syringes in tree trunks and gangs patrolling the streets. “In 1982, the local church was occupied by the English Collective of Prostitutes for 12 straight days.” Then, in the early 2000s, a real estate developer had a dream and, well, “now it is the AI hotbed of the United Kingdom,” Kanji said. “What a change.” Around 18 months ago, his portfolio company BioCorteX moved from the neighborhood Holborn to the Jellicoe building in King’s Cross, hoping to be near the action. “Lots going on in London right now,” Nik Sharma, co-founder of BioCorteX, told me. “Lots of hyperscalers moving in.” That includes, reportedly, Jeff Bezos’ AI company Prometheus, which is also said to be in talks to move into the Jellicoe.
There are around 3,600 AI startups in London, which, together, have raised around .1 billion out of the .8 billion raised in the city since late July, according to Dealroom. Since the start of June, AI-related startups have leased more than 1 million square feet of office space in London, according to the real estate firm Knight Frank. With that, prime rents in King’s Cross have risen 18% over the past three years, Chris Dunn, a commercial insight associate at the firm, told me. That percentage represents only the largest leases encompassing at least 10,000 square feet, like the ones OpenAI and Prometheus are signing. The shorter deals go for even more, he said, and now the vacancy rate for conventional office space is just 0.9%. “Demand has outstripped supply,” he continued.
Today, one of the big topics of the area is sovereignty. It was a wake-up call for many when Anthropic shut off access to Mythos and Fable this summer, leaving some in the ecosystem to conclude: “We’d better look after ourselves,” Saul Klein, co-founder of the VC firm Phoenix Court, told me.
Phoenix Court is located in the King’s Cross area and has three portfolio companies in the vicinity, including Olix (which just announced a .3 billion valuation), Early Health and CoMind. Robin Klein, co-founder of the firm, said the shutdown of Fable and Mythos access was a “small but sharp reminder that Europe can’t simply rent its AI capabilities and capacity; it needs to build and hold some of its own.” King’s Cross, he said, is where much of this building is actually happening.
“The bigger question,” he continued, “is whether the U.K. builds the infrastructure, compute, energy, capital, to make this self-reliance durable, rather than just hosting outposts of U.S. labs.”
Image Credits:Phoenix Court
Top founders want to stay
Simon Kohl, founder of Latent Labs, has offices in King’s Cross and San Francisco. The London office, at the moment, is growing faster, and he’s more bullish than ever on the ecosystem, he said. “The mood right now feels less like London trying to catch up and more like London becoming one of the default places to start a serious AI company,” he said. Look around and you are likely to see Wayve testing its autonomous cars. Founded in 2017 by co-founder Alex Kendall, the unicorn is one of London’s biggest success stories.
“Ten years ago, building a frontier AI company from London felt like an unusual choice,” Kendall told me. “Now it feels like an obvious one.” Wayve moved into King’s Cross in 2018 looking for a space that could double as a garage — “a rare combination in Central London,” Kendall said. He has watched the ecosystem mature around him — and it’s now evident that a startup can stay in London, raise serious capital, hire world-class AI talent, and remain globally competitive, he said. Down the street from Anthropic’s new 158,000-square-foot office is the AI agent builder Sierra and the AI video platform Synthesia.
Laura Gonzalez Florez, Synthesia’s chief of staff and head of people, says the company moved into its glossy new office building a year ago to accommodate its growing team. They were drawn to the area for the same reason as everyone else: “It’s very close to the airport … very close to where a lot of investors are,” she said.
Image Credits:Synthesia
Around two-thirds of Synthesia’s engineers are remote, Gonzalez Florez said, letting the company tap into an affordable, international, and diverse talent pool and helping it scale faster. “From London, we can hire and work, without any problem, people from anywhere, from Slovenia to Portugal,” she said.
Unsurprisingly, London’s AI boom is also causing a talent war.U.K. AI job postings have skyrocketed in the past few years, per data from PwC. When Anthropic announced it moved into town earlier this year, it listed, for example, a salary range of £260,000 to £630,000 for a machine learning research engineer when the average salary in London for the same role is around £102,000. Some founders in the U.K., like those in Silicon Valley, are being forced to raise more and bigger rounds to keep up.
“The real test is whether more globally significant AI companies are founded, funded, and scaled from the U.K., while continuing to attract the world’s best talent to build them here,” Zain Ali, founder of the King’s Cross-based AI legal firm Centuro, told me. “If that continues to happen, King’s Cross won’t just be an AI hub. It’ll become one of the U.K.’s most important strategic assets.”
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