If AI is the new economic engine, where are we headed?
Nvidia became the first company in history worth five trillion dollars; by the summer of 2026 it was trading the title of most valuable company back and forth with Apple. OpenAI committed half a trillion dollars to build AI infrastructure with SoftBank, Oracle, and MGX. Anthropic’s valuation went from 965 billion in under a year. The four largest cloud companies planned roughly seven hundred billion dollars in capital spending for 2026, nearly double the year before, most of it for AI. Apollo’s chief economist Torsten Slok called the AI buildout the foundational pillar of US growth; by 2026 it accounted for roughly half of that growth. In July, Slok himself began warning of a painful repricing. A contraction would not be quiet.
On May 14, 2024, Google began rolling out AI Overviews to all US users by default. You did not turn it on. You did not get an opt-out checkbox. One day the answer at the top of your screen was no longer a website someone had written. It was a paragraph a model had assembled.
It told someone to put glue on pizza so the cheese would stick, and the screenshot went viral. A Minnesota solar company called Wolf River Electric sued Google in March 2025, alleging an Overview had fabricated an attorney general investigation against them and cost the business between 210 million. By mid-2025, Pew Research found publisher click-through had nearly halved when an Overview appeared, falling from fifteen percent to eight. In May 2026, a Munich court held Google liable for what an Overview said about a business, the first ruling of its kind. Google is appealing.
The same year, Meta added an AI assistant to WhatsApp with no off switch. LinkedIn began feeding member posts into generative AI training with the opt-out switch already flipped on, and updated its terms of service only after journalists noticed. Microsoft bundled Copilot into Microsoft 365 and raised the subscription price before most users had decided whether they wanted it, then raised prices again in July 2026, up to forty-three percent on some plans, with Copilot folded into the base subscription.
Before AI can be used, it has to be trained. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google trained their foundation models on text, code, and images they did not pay for and did not ask permission to take. The New York Times sued. Music labels sued. John Carreyrou, the reporter who broke Theranos, joined a copyright lawsuit alleging the labs had trained on pirated copies of his book Bad Blood. In July 2026 a federal judge gave final approval to Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement with authors whose pirated books had trained its models, the largest copyright settlement on record. In January 2025, Sam Altman pledged to crack down on rivals distilling OpenAI’s outputs in the same week his lawyers were arguing in court that training on copyrighted books was fair use no AI lab could survive without. What they took from the public they called training. What was taken from them they called theft. When the bill finally came due, it was priced at three thousand dollars a book.
Each company also needs its AI to be in use. Investors are reading user counts. The data from active use feeds the next training run. The next training run requires the next data center. The next data center requires the next round of Nvidia chips. So the companies push their AI into products the user cannot easily leave. Engagement is the metric. Silence is read as agreement.
Days after the failures went viral, Google’s head of Search, Liz Reid, published a defense of the rollout. The frame was familiar. The system was working. The failures were rough edges. Whether the public had been entitled to refuse was not the question on the page. That AI is inevitable. That asking permission would slow it down. That what they took from the public belongs to no one, and what they made from it belongs to them. That a user who keeps using the product has consented to whatever the product becomes. That the economy needs this growth and could not absorb a contraction. That the cost of an Overview that gets it wrong is paid by the reader, the publisher, or the small business it defamed, not the platform.
None of these beliefs has been put to a vote. All of them have already shipped.