Brian Eno says AI's owners are 'some of the worst people' to be in charge of it, as he relaunches Opal Records

Fascinated. That’s the word Brian Eno used for working with AI, in an Associated Press interview published on October 13, 2026.

His problem is who owns it. “My problem with AI is the ownership of it and what I know are the moral and social values of the people who own it,” Eno told AP. “And they are really some of the worst people to be in charge of something as powerful as that.”

Eno gave the interview in his London home studio, ahead of relaunching Opal Records, the label he founded in 1988.

Brian Eno’s problem with AI is who owns it

Eno’s argument is about the companies behind AI, and what the race between them does.

“Because they’re all so chasing the dollar so earnestly, they’re in competition with each other,” he said, “so they’re trying to outdo each other only in terms of winning that particular competition, not in terms of what benefits the world.”

Then he got to timing. The years when a technology is emerging matter most, Eno said, and the public needs to be engaged in them.

“Otherwise, you end with this ludicrous situation we have now, of agentic AIs that are far too powerful for any of us to understand at the moment, including the people who make them,” he said. Agentic AI is AI that takes actions on its own, like booking or buying things for you, rather than only answering questions.

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It's a real failure of regulation.

Other artists who spoke up this year argued about AI in their own work. Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter rejected AI tools because prompting can’t give him the unpredictability he needs, and Olivia Rodrigo drew a hard line after ChatGPT’s song title ideas came back “awful.”

Brian Eno relaunches Opal Records with 2 reissues on October 16, 2026

Opal Records returns on Friday, October 16. Eno ran the label from 1988 until its hiatus in 1991, putting out records by Jon Hassell, John Cale and himself.

The relaunch starts with 2 albums that “had disappeared,” as he put it: Drawn From Life from 2001 and Another Day on Earth from 2005. Both have been hard to find outside Japan for close to 20 years.

He has a bigger idea for the label too, a 12-album set of music he has made and never released. “It’s the kind of thing you put on if you want to clean the house or read a book or something like that,” Eno said.

Music for Airports is still selling 48 years after its release, Eno said, and he would love to retire. “But I don’t know what I’d do if I retired.”