Treblo, the AI music startup formerly known as Sonauto, published a public detector on Sunday night that flags Fenix Flexin's 'Rubberz' — currently No. 58 on the Billboard Hot 100 with 7 million views on its music video — as 'Very likely Treblo.' A track from Tyga's new $TARFACE project, released in early July, returns 'Likely Treblo.' The company says the detector's false positive rate is under one in 10,000, less than a fraction of a percent, and has released the code under an open source license.
The tool, published on a page titled 'Was This Made With Treblo?,' effectively has an AI music vendor snitching on two of the highest-profile songs of the summer. Treblo cofounder Ryan Tremblay told WIRED the company had not spoken to either artist and 'wasn't even aware [Rubberz] existed until after it hit the Hot 100.' A blog post accompanying the detector says it is 'tuned to detect songs made with Treblo with little to no modification.'
'Rubberz' officially dropped on June 5 as a synth-pop track that sounds nothing like Fenix Flexin's usual style. The Fenix Flexin who debuted with Shoreline Mafia in the late 2010s raps in a nasally East Hollywood cadence; the voice on 'Rubberz' is closer to a chipper Morrissey. Fenix and credited producer Purps on the Beat have denied AI use, with Fenix telling Channel 5 he 'freestyled' the lyrics and commenting on an On the Radar performance: 'No sirrrrrrr, recorded same as all music I do! Only difference is auto-tune reverb and me using my fake uk accent lol.'
Key facts
- 01Treblo's new detector flags 'Rubberz,' currently No. 58 on the Billboard Hot 100, as 'Very likely Treblo.'
- 02A Tyga track released in early July returns 'Likely Treblo' in the same detector.
- 03Treblo claims a false positive rate under one in 10,000 and has open-sourced the detector's code.
- 04The startup renamed itself from Sonauto two days before 'Rubberz' was released on June 5.
- 05The 'Rubberz' music video has racked up 7 million views despite the AI-generation debate.
The turning point came Thursday, when independent producer Medasin posted a video methodically arguing that Fenix had used Treblo. He noted that the app was renamed from Sonauto just two days before 'Rubberz' dropped, and produced a screen cap from one of Fenix's Instagram Stories showing a filename ending in 'Sonauto.mp3.' He then generated a similar-sounding track by prompting Treblo with tags like '80s synthwave' and 'rapper lifestyle,' producing lyrics with striking overlap: Medasin's output had 'Diamond chains hanging heavy' against 'Rubberz's' 'Now I bought a heavy diamond chain,' plus matching motifs of 'pockets thick' and 'plastic smiles.'
WIRED's own tests replicated the pattern. Combining an '80s' tag with a rap-lyrics prompt on Treblo repeatedly produced lyrics with 'finger/linger' rhymes, references to rings and glass, and night-to-day thematic transitions. One generated song included the couplet 'Rings on every finger / Leather seats and cedar scent linger,' a near-mirror of 'Rubberz's' 'Gold rings on my fingers / Still your perfume lingers.'
Fenix responded Thursday afternoon by posting what he said was the original project file for 'Rubberz' to Instagram. Producers in the comments argued the file looked like the output of a stem separator applied to a finished track rather than a session built from scratch. Fenix deleted the post hours later. Neither he nor Purps on the Beat has addressed the takedown. Requests for comment from WIRED went unanswered.
Two days later, on Saturday, Medasin posted a second video connecting Tyga's $TARFACE material to Treblo. The evidence there is looser — shared label, shared rapper-to-'80s-crooner pivot, videos of Tyga and Fenix together — but a friend's in-development AI detector also flagged a Tyga song. Treblo's own detector, published Sunday night, then returned 'Likely Treblo' on the early July release. Tyga's label did not respond to WIRED's requests for comment.
The launch lands inside a broader wave of platform-level AI disclosure. The same day Medasin posted, LinkedIn rolled out a 'seems like AI' flagging button. Substack released an AI-writing detector for newsletters two weeks earlier. Tidal has blocked monetization of AI-generated music, and Spotify users maintain a crowdsourced slop tracker in the absence of a platform tag. A bipartisan AI Labeling Act now sits in the US Senate, which would require platforms to visibly label AI-generated content.
What Treblo's move exposes is the market's actual position on all this: many listeners do not care. Comments on Medasin's video split between people who accept 'Rubberz' as AI and enjoy it anyway, and people accusing Medasin of jealousy. Medasin himself concedes he liked the song when he first heard it and still enjoys it ironically.
The Treblo detector is the more consequential story than the 'Rubberz' controversy itself. A generative AI vendor shipping a first-party classifier — open-sourced, with a claimed sub-0.01% false positive rate — sets a template Suno and Udio will now be pressured to match. It also reframes the AI-music economy: if the tool that makes the song can also confirm it, the argument shifts from detection to disclosure, and the artists using these tools quietly lose the plausible deniability that has powered the summer's biggest hit.
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