OpenAI Buys Voice-Cloning Startup to Kill Its Catalog

OpenAI acquired Weights.gg, a six-person voice-cloning startup, earlier this year. The startup's Replay app hosted AI voice models of Taylor Swift, Kanye West, Samuel L. Jackson, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, members of K-pop group Blackpink, and fictional characters like Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. Weights.gg had raised roughly 4 million dollars in venture capital before the deal. The hosted services shut down on March 31, several weeks before the New York Times reported the acquisition on May 15. The team was split up and sent to different groups within OpenAI. The company says it will not release a similar product. The most straightforward reading: OpenAI did not buy a team to build something. It bought a cleanup. The catalog disappears, the IP transfers, and a potential source of legal exposure goes away before the company tries to list publicly. OpenAI is preparing for a stock market listing that could come in late 2026 or 2027. The company is currently generating around 25 billion dollars in annualised revenue at a private valuation of 852 billion dollars, though it is still projected to lose money through at least 2029. A formal filing with the US securities regulator would require OpenAI to disclose material acquisitions and any related legal risks. The legal environment around voice cloning has hardened fast. At least 12 US states now have laws requiring written consent before anyone copies another person's voice. Tennessee passed the ELVIS Act in 2024, the first state law specifically criminalising unauthorised AI voice replication. New York extended its existing right-of-publicity protections to cover AI voice clones in 2025. Courts in both the US and EU have started treating a person's voice as personal identity, not just audio content. Meanwhile, Scarlett Johansson had already threatened legal action against OpenAI over a ChatGPT voice assistant she said sounded like her. Taylor Swift has applied to trademark her voice and likeness with the US Patent and Trademark Office. Samuel L. Jackson has publicly objected to his voice being copied. The Weights.gg catalog sat at the intersection of all of these pressure points. Notably, voice-cloning technology itself is not hard to find. Competitors like ElevenLabs now require written consent and identity verification before anyone clones a voice. ElevenLabs even operates a licensed celebrity voice marketplace featuring figures like Michael Caine. Other tools can clone a voice from a short audio clip on ordinary consumer hardware. The technology is not the rare or valuable thing here. What OpenAI removed was the specific public catalog of names, and the liability that came with it. OpenAI's own voice tools remain tightly controlled. Its Voice Engine product, announced in early 2024, is still limited to a small number of trusted partners working in areas like speech therapy, language learning, and customer support. The company's developer API does offer real-time voice and translation features, but those run under usage policies that prohibit impersonation and require disclosure of AI-generated audio. For businesses using or evaluating voice AI tools, the Weights.gg story carries a practical signal. The direction of regulation is clear. Consent requirements are expanding, not contracting. Any vendor or internal project that uses a real person's voice without documented permission is carrying legal risk that courts and regulators are increasingly willing to act on. The platforms that stay in business are the ones building consent and licensing into the workflow from the start, not treating it as a detail to handle later.