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Why did Akkadian cuneiform have many more phonetic values than early Sumerian writing?

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Sumerian cuneiform tablet — cuneiform An account of barley distribution, probably from Uruk, Mesopotamia, c. 3100–2900 bce; in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.

Akkadian cuneiform developed a significantly larger inventory of phonetic values than early Sumerian writing because the Akkadians had to adapt a script originally designed for a completely different language to their own Semitic tongue.1

When the Akkadians adopted the Sumerian writing system, they retained the existing logograms but pronounced them as Akkadian words. To accommodate their language, they expanded the phonetic usage of these signs far beyond the original Sumerian inventory of simple syllables (such as ba or ab). They transferred many complex Sumerian syllabic values (such as kan, mul, or bat) to the phonetic level and added new, complicated values derived from Akkadian readings of the logograms.1

This process led to an increase in polyphony, where a single sign could represent multiple phonetic values depending on the context. For example, a sign originally representing "sun" might be read as ud, tam, tú, par, laḫ, or ḫiš. Because no systematic effort was made to simplify these overlapping values, the complexity of the script grew significantly throughout the history of Akkadian cuneiform.1