Dr. Dre says he uses AI in the studio, and only people who struggle to create are scared of it

Dr. Dre said he is already using AI in his production work, in an interview with The New York Times published on Sunday, August 23, 2026. Asked whether AI threatens the music business, the Aftermath founder and Beats co-founder said he doesn’t see it that way, and pointed at the people who do. “I think the only people that see it as a threat are the people who have trouble creating,” he said.

The 8-time Grammy winner sat for the interview alongside Jimmy Iovine, his business partner of three decades, who went further and said he sees no downside to AI in music at all. The comments spread fast, and the reaction in Dre’s own Instagram comments ran hot enough for fans to ask how much money he has in AI companies.

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OK, you sound like the person that would have been against the drum machine when it came out.

Why Dr. Dre reached for the drum machine comparison

Dre described an argument he’d had a few days earlier with people who were against AI. He told them they sounded like someone who would have fought the drum machine, then extended it to synthesizers. “It’s a new tool for creativity,” he said, per Variety. “Some people are afraid of learning new things. I’m embracing it. I can’t wait to see what’s going to happen with this.”

It’s an old argument with a good record. The sampler, the drum machine and Auto-Tune all arrived as the thing killing real music, and all of them are now furniture. We’ve written about how that panic cycle keeps repeating, and Dre reaching for the same comparison from inside the studio carries more weight than a columnist reaching for it from outside.

What he actually described doing is narrower than the headlines suggest. “Yes, I’m using it,” he told the paper, per IBTimes UK. “Again, as a tool to see what it would do with what I just did.” He makes something, then hands it to the model to hear the response. Nobody is typing a prompt and shipping the first bounce. Thomas Bangalter of Daft Punk, who called prompting a way to bypass the creative process, is describing a different workflow entirely and arguing against it.

What Dr. Dre saying it out loud does for working producers

The technical news here is small. The permission news is not. Dre sits at the top of the credibility ladder in this business, and producers below him have been carrying a stigma about naming their tools. He named his.

That stigma was already cracking. D’Addario used Suno Studio for a product demo and said so. Tyga has been open about Suno on his $TARFACE album. Fenix Flexin denied AI on his Billboard hit for months before a detector built by the tool he used said otherwise. Dre’s comment moves the default from denial to disclosure, and the artists who tell the story themselves come out of it better than the ones who get found out.

Neither Dre nor Iovine said a word about training data, consent, or compensation. Those are the terms being fought over in the Suno and Udio cases right now, and a producer saying he likes the tool does nothing to settle them.