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Brit Award-winning singer Jorja Smith’s record label has said it wants a share of the royalties for a song it claims was created using an artificial intelligence “clone” of the singer’s voice.

I Run by British dance act Haven went viral on TiKTok in October thanks, in part, to smooth soul vocals by an uncredited female singer.

It was heading for the charts in the UK and the US but was banned by streaming services after record industry bodies issued takedown notices, alleging the track violated copyright by impersonating another artist.

Although I Run has now been re-released with new vocals, Smith’s label FAMM said it believes the track was made with AI trained on her work, and is seeking compensation.

“This isn’t just about Jorja. It’s bigger than one artist or one song,” FAMM wrote in a statement on Instagram.

The label said it believes “both versions of the track infringe on Jorja’s rights and unfairly take advantage of the work of all the songwriters with whom she collaborates”.

Smith is known for songs like Be Honest and Little Things, and was named best British female at the Brit Awards in 2019.

Suggesting that her fans had been misled by Haven’s track, the label added: “We cannot allow this to become the new normal”.

The team behind the song have admitted using AI during its creation.

Producer and songwriter Harrison Walker said the original vocals were actually his own, but were heavily manipulated using music-generation software Suno – sometimes called the “ChatGPT for music“.

Meanwhile, the second producer Waypoint, real name Jacob Donaghue, confirmed on social media that AI was used to “give our original vocal a female tone”.

Donaghue and Walker maintain that they wrote and produced the song – and even shared videos of their original computer files with Billboard magazine.

“It shouldn’t be any secret that I used AI-assisted vocal processing to transform solely my voice for I Run,” Walker explained.

“As a songwriter and producer I enjoy using new tools, techniques and staying on the cutting edge of what’s happening.

“To set the record straight, the artists behind HAVEN. are real and human, and all we want to do is make great music for other humans.”

Suno has admitted that its software was trained on copyrighted works, claiming that doing so was legal under the “fair use” laws – which allows copyrighted material to be quoted for purposes such as criticism, news reporting and research.

However, it is not known whether Smith’s recordings formed part of that training data. According to Haven, they simply prompted the software to use “soulful vocal samples” while creating their song.

While their original version of I Run was suspended by both the Official Charts Company in the UK and the Billboard Charts in America, the replacement entered the UK Top 40 last week.

FAMM framed the original song’s existence as a test case for the music industry’s relationship with AI.

The label said it had “a duty to speak up” and “encourage public discourse”, because AI is proliferating at an “alarming rate and substantially outpacing regulation”.

“AI material should be clearly labelled as such so that the public may choose whether they consume AI material or not,” the statement continued.

Smith shared FAMM’s statement on her own Instagram page.

It warned that artists and other creators were becoming “collateral damage in the race by governments and corporations towards AI dominance”.

It also said the label would share any royalties with the writers behind Smith’s music.

“If we are successful in establishing that AI helped to write the lyrics and melody in I Run and are awarded a share of the song, we would seek to allocate each of Jorja’s co-writers with a pro-rata share,” it said.

“This allocation would be based on the [percentage] of Jorja’s catalogue that they have contributed to, as, ultimately, if AI helped to write I Run, it would have been trained on Jorja’s catalogue of songs.”

The rise of AI music has been a source of fascination and consternation for the music industry.

In June, the band Velvet Sundown racked up millions of streams on Spotify before revealing that they used AI to assist in creating their dusty, roots-rock sound.

Last month, an AI-generated “artist” known as Breaking Rust topped the US country digital song sales chart – a niche countdown, but one that shows audiences aren’t averse to consuming computer-generated music.

Suno was sued for copyright infringement by all three of the world’s major record labels last year, but the cases have now been settled.

Warner Music subsequently signed a partnership with the company, which will allow users to create AI-generated songs using the voices, names and likenesses of the Warner acts who opt in to the service.

It is unclear how many artists will agree to these uses.

Last week, musicians including Sir Paul McCartney, Annie Lennox, Damon Albarn and Kate Bush released a vinyl album full of silent songs, or recordings of empty studios, in protest at planned changes to copyright law, which they say would make it easier for AI companies to train models using copyrighted work without a licence.

The record had previously been uploaded to streaming services in February.

The Spanish football giant Barcelona has told fans it has “no connection whatsoever” with the digital coin offered by its new crypto partner, following criticism over the deal.

Clubs often pick up sponsors in unusual areas to bring in extra money – with Arsenal bringing in Persil as its fabric care partner in 2023, and Kellogg’s becoming Manchester City’s breakfast cereal partner that same year.

But far less is known about Zero Knowledge Proof (ZKP), which signed a three-year sponsorship deal in mid-November with Barcelona.

ZKP then announced a cryptocurrency, prompting concerns Barcelona fans could be led to invest in it – leading the club to distance itself from the coin.

“The club has no responsibility for, or involvement in, the issuance or management of this token, nor does it use the associated technology,” the club said in a statement on its website.

Little is known about ZKP, which also announced a similar sponsorship deal with Australian rugby league team Dolphins in early November.

On its website, it says the project has been founded and developed by “a pseudonymous collective” based across “multiple jurisdictions”.

In other words, the firm is not revealing the names or locations of those behind it.

University of Sussex professor Carol Alexander said the Barcelona brand gives enormous visibility to crypto firms like ZKP – but there is “substantial risk for supporters who buy the tokens”.

“Sponsorship creates an aura of credibility, even when the underlying project is opaque,” she told the BBC – saying this meant fans and supporters should be “very cautious”.

“Before buying any crypto asset they should ask who controls it, where the documentation is, and what recourse they have if it fails,” she said.

“With ZKP, none of those answers are clear.”

Details about ZKP are few and far between, with the firm even claiming it has no single headquarter.

But the Financial Times reported an earlier version of the company’s terms listed an office located in Apia, the capital of Samoa.

The ZKP name is also the term used to describe a type of technology designed to enhance the privacy of a blockchain – a digital record of transactions which underpins cryptocurrencies.

Its deal with Barcelona comes as the football club is reportedly facing an uphill struggle to raise revenue and relieve its debt.

“Barcelona’s finances in recent years have been perilous, so the club appears to have adopted a strategy of ‘bank the money first, ask questions later’,” said football finance expert and author Kieran Maguire.

He told the BBC “crypto products seek legitimacy and normalisation from those that speculate on their products”.

To partner with a football club, particularly one as well-known as Barcelona, “helps achieve those ambitions,” he said.

And former Barcelona youth player Xavier Vilajoana, who reportedly is bidding to be its next president, called on the club to clarify how the deal had come about in a post on X.

He also asked the club about ZKP’s relationship with self-proclaimed misogynist Andrew Tate – one of only three X accounts the crypto firm follows on the platform.

The BBC has approached Barcelona for a response.

The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) has drafted in a leading cyber-security expert as it investigates how a document – containing key details of Wednesday’s Budget – went live too early.

Rachel Reeves’s statement was thrown into chaos after the OBR’s economic forecast appeared online around 40 minutes before she announced her policies.

Even though the document was not listed on the OBR website, journalists – including those at the BBC – were able to access it by guessing its URL, which was very similar to one used in a previous official document.

OBR chairman Richard Hughes said he was “personally mortified” by what happened and the results of a “full investigation” would be reported to MPs.

Patrick Burgess, cyber-security expert with BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, told the BBC that the incident “didn’t appear to be a cyber-attack” but instead “a straightforward data-handling mistake”.

He added that whilst a review of the OBR’s cyber-security could be “helpful”, the solution was to “normalise and randomise file names” so that unpublished material could not be discovered earlier than intended.

“This is a reminder that good cyber practice often starts with good digital housekeeping,” he said.

Details of the Budget are supposed to be kept under wraps until the chancellor announces them in the House of Commons, due to them being market-sensitive.

But early publication of the OBR’s report effectively confirmed a number of new measures, including a pay-per-mile charge on electric vehicles, and a three-year freeze on income tax and National Insurance thresholds.

The OBR quickly removed the forecast document from its website and apologised for the release, which it blamed on a “technical error”.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Thursday, Mr Hughes said the document was not published “on our web page itself”.

In other words, it was not linked to directly by the OBR website.

However, it had still been published online ahead of the Budget being announced.

“It appears there was a link that someone was able to access,” he said. “We need to get to the bottom of what exactly happened.”

Mr Hughes said Professor Ciaran Martin, a former head of the National Cyber Security Centre, would provide “expert input” for the OBR’s investigation.

The BBC was able to access the PDF version of the OBR’s key report at 11:45 on Wednesday by replacing the word ‘March’ with ‘November’ in the web address of a previous edition.

Five minutes earlier, the Reuters news agency had started sending out one-line news flashes summarising contents of the report.

This was followed by a brief spell of volatility in the UK bond and currency markets.

Gilt yields – which give an indication of government borrowing costs – fell sharply, before climbing back to above the level they had been at before the details were leaked.

Mr Hughes acknowledged the “deep disruption” caused, and said he took responsibility “on behalf of the OBR” for “inadvertently allowing” early access to document.

Asked on Wednesday if he would resign, he said: “I’ve given you a statement, that is all I have to say.”

Reacting to the leak in the Politics Live studio, BBC political editor Chris Mason said: “The sheer absurdity of reading out something the chancellor has not yet announced in the Commons is mind-blowing”.

BBC economics editor Faisal Islam said: “I think I need a red box, I can deliver the Budget now in the studio… It tells you all the measures, it tells you all the big stats we were just speculating over.”

The unexpected release caused a reaction in the Commons chamber as Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) started, with Reeves seen looking at her own phone with concern, before Treasury Minister Torsten Bell, who was sitting behind her, passed his mobile phone to her as the news broke.

Notes were being passed down the row of cabinet ministers before the Chief secretary to the Treasury James Murray held his phone in front of Reeves and she copied down some words onto the top of what seemed to be her Budget speech.

Conservative MPs quickly started posting pages of the document on social media and Tory frontbenchers, including shadow chancellor Mel Stride, were seen whispering and making notes.

Stride then called a point of order at the end of PMQs to demand an inquiry into the leak, saying: “It is utterly outrageous that this has happened and this leak may constitute a criminal act.”

There have already been weeks of leaks and speculation over policy to the media in the run-up to the Budget, which the chancellor was reprimanded for by deputy speaker Nus Ghani.

Although this is the first time the OBR has made this sort of mistake, it is not the first time parts of the Budget have leaked out before they should have done.

Back in 2013, the Evening Standard mistakenly published details of George Osborne’s Budget before he got to his feet in the Commons, including details of major announcements on tax.

The then-Labour leader Ed Miliband was reading a photocopy of the front page as Osborne spoke and said the chancellor “almost need not have bothered coming” to the Commons.

In 1996, the Daily Mirror was sent the full contents of Chancellor Ken Clarke’s Budget in advance of his speech.

Piers Morgan, who was the paper’s editor at the time, only published some details in the next day’s paper, sending the rest back to the Treasury.

At the time, prime minister John Major ordered a leak inquiry and the Metropolitan Police investigated, but no one was arrested.

In 1947, the Labour Chancellor Hugh Dalton was forced to resign after giving a journalist details of the Budget before making his statement.

The media regulator has published guidelines designed to make the internet safer for women and girls – and threatened to make it “absolutely clear to the public” which platforms are not adhering to them.

Ofcom says it hopes the measures will make it easier to report and act on online abuse, acknowledging that those processes are currently “soul destroying.”

However, they are recommendations rather than legal requirements, with the regulator hoping the threat of platforms being outed for not complying with them will compel them to act.

Critics say it and the government need to go further if they want to make the online world safer.

“Until we have legally enforced mandatory code of practice, we don’t think we’ll really see a shift in tech platforms taking this issue seriously enough,” said Andrea Simon, executive director of the End Violence Against Women Coalition.

Influencer and women’s sport advocate Demi Brown told the BBC she had been forced to “become resilient” in response to negative comments about her weight and appearance online.

She said it was wrong that she had to use the block button to remove abuse and prevent trolling on her social media accounts.

“I don’t think that we should be worried about the online space, it should be a place where we can authentically be ourselves,” she told the BBC.

Ofcom’s new guidelines announced on Tuesday include asking firms to:

• put all account privacy settings in one place
• de-monetise content containing sexual violence
• allow abusive comments to be reported collectively, not one-by-one as is currently the case

“It’s about making reporting much easier so that you can report multiple accounts that are abusing you at the same time rather than having to do them one by one, which is absolutely soul destroying,” said Ofcom boss Dame Melanie Dawes.

“It’s lots of small steps that together will help to keep people safer so that they can enjoy life online,” she added.

She insisted the threat of being called out would be a powerful one for tech firms.

“I think that the transparency that we’re going to bring to this will be a very strong incentive,” she said.

UK Technology Secretary Liz Kendall said tech firms “have the ability and the technical tools to block and delete online misogyny”.

The guidance complements previous codes, rules and guidelines issued by the watchdog as it enforces the Online Safety Act, which became law in 2023.

Sahra-Aisha Muhammad-Jones founded a running club for Muslim women in east London and said negative DMs and comments can put younger women off being online at all.

Despite having built a positive community around her, she said she still does not feel safe on the internet.

“There is the side to social media that is really harmful and really scary, and you have to be on alert all the time,” she told BBC News.

Former secretary of state Baroness Nicky Morgan told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme it had been a “long battle” to see such measures established.

But she said seeing them emerge in the form of guidelines, rather than rules, for tech firms was “disappointing”.

“I think it gets some basic ground rules in place but of course, it does depend on the attitude of the tech platforms adopting the practical guidance put forward,” she said.

While some platforms may opt to do so, she said, “some just won’t care and will carry on with the deeply harmful content that we see online today”.

The concerns come amid wider criticism of the regulator for not having enough teeth.

So far Ofcom has issued only two fines for breaches of the Act.

One of the fined platforms, 4Chan, has refused to pay its £20,000 penalty and launched legal action in the US.

Ofcom is trying to walk a tightrope between online safety and freedom of speech. It is also dealing with US-based tech giants which own the UK’s most popular social networks.

US Vice President JD Vance said earlier this year that the White House was growing tired of other countries trying to regulate American tech businesses.

Ms Kendall wrote to Ofcom recently saying it was in danger of “losing the public’s trust” if the pace of change didn’t pick up, and campaigners like the Molly Rose Foundation say the laws do not go far enough to protect people from online harm.

Chris Boardman, former pro-cyclist and chair of Sport England, complained to Ofcom in the summer about the treatment of women in sport online.

During last year’s Euro Championships, Lioness footballer Jess Carter was forced off social media because of online racial abuse.

Tennis star Katie Boulter, who received death threats following the French Open, also said abusive comments had become “the norm”.

In his letter, Mr Boardman said sexist online abuse of athletes counteracted efforts to encourage more women to take up sport.

“The action can be taken,” he told the BBC, “you’ve got AI [and] algorithms now that are ruthlessly targeting marketing to increase participation and profit”.

“We now need to use those same tools to curb the abuse in the first place rather than having to work with dealing with it after the fact,” he said.

Chip giant Nvidia beat Wall Street’s expectations for revenue and upcoming sales, easing investor concerns about heavy artificial intelligence (AI) spending that have unsettled markets.

In its quarterly earnings report on Wednesday, the firm said revenue for the three months to October jumped 62% to $57bn, driven by demand for its chips used in AI data centres. Sales from that division rose 66% to more than $51bn.

Fourth-quarter sales forecasts in the range of $65bn also topped estimates, sending shares in Nvidia about 4% higher in after-hours trading.

Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company, is seen as a bellwether for the AI boom. The chip-maker’s results could inform market sentiment.

Chief executive Jensen Huang said in a statement that sales of its AI Blackwell systems were “off the charts” and that “cloud GPUs [graphics processing units] are sold out”.

“There’s been a lot of talk about an AI bubble. From our vantage point, we see something very different,” he said, on a call with analysts.

“We excel at every phase of AI.”

The chip-maker’s quarterly report garnered even more attention than usual on Wall Street amid mounting concern that AI stocks are overvalued – fears that may persist despite Nvidia’s blockbuster results.

Those fears had fueled four consecutive daily drops in the S&P 500 index leading up to Wednesday, as questions swirl about returns on AI investments. The benchmark index has fallen nearly 3% so far in November.

The bar was high heading into Nvidia’s results.

Adam Turnquist, chief technical strategist for LPL Financial, said the question was not whether the company would beat expectations, “but by how much”.

“While AI valuations are dominating the news feeds, Nvidia is going about its business in style,” said Matt Britzman, senior equity analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown.

He said valuations for certain areas of the AI sector “needed to take a breather, but Nvidia is not in that camp”.

Mr Huang had previously said he expected $500bn in AI chip orders through next year. Investors were looking for details about when the company expects those revenues will come to fruition, and how it plans to fulfill the orders.

Colette Kress, Nvidia’s chief financial officer, told analysts the company would “probably” be taking more orders on top of the $500bn that had already been announced.

But she also expressed disappointment about regulatory limits that stymie the company’s ability to export its chips to China, saying the US “must win the support of every developer” including those in China.

She said Nvidia was “committed to continued engagement” with the American and Chinese governments.

Earlier Wednesday at the US-Saudi Investment Forum in Washington, Mr Huang joined Elon Musk to announce a massive data centre complex in Saudi Arabia that will have Musk’s AI company, xAI, as its first customer.

The facility will be outfitted with hundreds of thousands of Nvidia chips.

The Wall Street Journal reported the US Commerce Department has approved the sale of up to 70,000 advanced AI chips to state-backed companies in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, reversing an earlier decision.

The agreement was brokered following talks between US President Donald Trump and Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, who visited the White House this week.

The titans of the technology sector are ramping up their spending on AI, as they rush to reap the benefits of a boom that has pushed stocks to record highs.

Earnings reports from Meta, Alphabet and Microsoft last month reaffirmed the colossal amounts of money these firms are shelling out for everything from data centres to chips.

Sundar Pichai, the head of Google’s parent firm Alphabet, told the BBC that while the growth of AI investment had been an “extraordinary moment”, there was some “irrationality” in the current AI boom. His comments came amid other warnings from industry leaders.

Nvidia, which makes chips that are crucial for AI data centres, is at the heart of a web of deals among key players in the AI space such as OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI.

The deals have drawn scrutiny for their circular nature, as AI firms increasingly invest in one another. The agreements include Nvidia’s $100bn investment in OpenAI, the firm behind ChatGPT.

Additional reporting by Lily Jamali, North America Technology Correspondent, San Francisco