Anti-AIPerson

Max Richter

Composer

World-leading post-classical composer (“On the Nature of Daylight,” “Sleep”). He testified to UK MPs that letting AI train on copyrighted music is “unfair and unworkable” and joined the 1,000-artist silent protest album.

Musician Entertainment

Wikipedia maxrichtermusic.com

In his words

The default assumption should be that artists’ work cannot be used to train AIs unless they choose to opt in.

— Testimony to UK Parliament, 2025

Music is one of the defining human characteristics… But all of this will fade into history unless we support creators’ rights.

— Testimony to UK Parliament, 2025

Biography

Max Richter (born 1966 in Hamelin, Germany, and raised in England) is the defining composer of the post-classical movement. “On the Nature of Daylight” (2004) became modern cinema’s signature elegy, his “Recomposed” Vivaldi reimagined the Four Seasons for the streaming era, and the eight-hour lullaby “Sleep” (2015) became a cultural phenomenon in its own right, alongside prolific film and television scoring.

Taking the argument to Parliament

On February 4, 2025, Richter gave evidence to a joint session of the UK Parliament’s culture and technology select committees examining the government’s proposal to let AI developers train on copyrighted works unless creators opt out. He called the plan “unfair and unworkable,” warned that AI models could already generate music sounding “uncannily” like him with “nothing” he could do about it, and argued the process would “impoverish” human creators while producing a “vanilla-isation” of music culture.

Without copyright, the chances are that most of the music you love by them would not exist.

— Testimony to UK Parliament, via DJ Mag, 2025

Three weeks later Richter was credited among the 1,000-plus co-writers of “Is This What We Want?”, the silent album of empty-studio recordings organized by Ed Newton-Rex with Kate Bush, Damon Albarn, and Hans Zimmer, whose track titles spell out “The British Government Must Not Legalise Music Theft To Benefit AI Companies.”