Drake enlists AI Tupac and Snoop Dogg in rap feud

Rap beefs have seen plenty of dirty tricks, but bringing dead hip-hop legends back from the grave via generative AI is uncharted territory.

On Friday night, Drake escalated his simmering war with Kendrick Lamar by dropping a track titled Taylor Made Freestyle on Instagram. With Kendrick still silent following Drake's recently leaked and officially released diss track Push Ups, the Canadian superstar decided to summon reinforcements from Tupac Shakur and Snoop Dogg using computer-generated vocals.

Ghosts of the West Coast

The track opens with an eerily accurate synthetic Tupac calling out Kendrick directly, mocking him as the supposed West Coast savior who disappeared when the pressure ramped up. In a wild twist of reverse psychology, the AI Tupac even feeds Kendrick lines on how to attack Drake, mentioning real-world rumors and controversy around Drake's personal life.

Next comes a generated Snoop Dogg verse, chiming in as an elder statesman watching Lamar run out of moves on the board. Industry observers widely suspect Drake recorded the reference vocals himself before running them through AI voice-conversion tools to mimic the two West Coast icons.

Drake only jumps in with his real voice toward the end, bragging that his previous diss only took an hour or two to write, while mocking Kendrick for freezing up. On Instagram, he posted the track with a dry caption: While we wait on you I guess.

Caught in the Swift storm

Drake also offered his own theory as to why Kendrick has not fired back yet, pointing directly to Taylor Swift's massive new album drop, The Tortured Poets Department. He joked that Lamar cannot drop music right now because Swift's album would overshadow everything in culture, cleverly playing on Lamar's former label Top Dawg Entertainment by calling Taylor his new Top.

The high-stakes feud traces back to last month, when Kendrick dropped a surprise feature on Future and Metro Boomin's Like That, rejecting the idea from Drake and J. Cole's First Person Shooter that hip-hop currently has a big three. J. Cole initially fired back with 7 Minute Drill on his surprise project, only to publicly apologize and yank the track from streaming shortly after.

Why it matters

Rap beef has always been about psychological warfare, but Drake using synthetic voices of his rival's idols sets a wild new precedent for mainstream music. Voice-cloning tech was already floating around fan forums and TikTok, but having a global megastar use uncredited, unlicensed AI personas in a marquee dispute brings deepfake audio straight to the top of pop culture.

We think Drake's tactical play is brilliant on a pettiness level: Kendrick views Tupac as a sacred figure of West Coast culture, so having a cloned Pac insult him directly hits where it hurts most. But legally and ethically, this looks like a massive minefield. Using the likeness and distinct timbre of a deceased legend and an active peer without formal clearance opens up glaring legal vulnerabilities that estates and record labels will struggle to ignore.