US musician pleads guilty in first-ever AI streaming fraud case, faces $8 million forfeiture
Michael Smith, a 54-year-old musician from Cornelius, North Carolina, pleaded guilty on March 19, 2026, in federal court in the Southern District of New York to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. The case marks the first criminal prosecution for AI-assisted streaming fraud in United States history.
From 2017 to 2024, Smith generated hundreds of thousands of songs using artificial intelligence and had them streamed billions of times via automated bots across Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and YouTube Music. To avoid detection by anti-fraud systems, the bots accessed the platforms through VPNs. According to a Rolling Stone investigation, Smith operated 1,040 accounts, each streaming around 636 of his AI-generated tracks per day — roughly 661,000 streams daily, earning him over $1 million a year.
Prosecutors established that from late 2018, Smith worked with the CEO of an AI music company, agreeing to split a portion of his earnings. Billboard reported that hundreds of the songs registered to Smith list Alex Mitchell, founder of the service Boomy, as a co-writer.
Under the terms of his plea agreement, Smith must forfeit $8,091,843.64 and faces up to five years in prison. Sentencing is scheduled for July 29, 2026. US Attorney Jay Clayton stated that while the songs and listeners were fake, the money stolen was real — millions in royalties diverted from legitimate artists and rights holders. The case has underscored the growing scale of the problem: Deezer reported that 85% of streams tied to AI-generated tracks in 2025 were fraudulent.
