The AI industry's existential race for profits

Hogging seats on a crowded train, not saying excuse me, watching videos on your phone with no headphones in. Sometimes it feels like we don't know how to act anymore. What we have been seeing, increasingly, is people breaking rules. Why should I play by the rules if nobody else is going to do that for me? This week on Explain It to Me, how to mind your manners.

New episodes Sundays wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil Apatel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today, let's talk about the looming AI monetization cliff and whether some of the biggest companies in the space can become real, profitable businesses before they careen right off it. My guest today is Hayden Field, who's our senior AI reporter here at The Verge, and she's been keeping close tabs on both Anthropic and OpenAI, and how those two companies in particular tell us a whole lot.

about the AI industry as a whole in 2026. You've certainly heard a version of the monetization cliff story before. Anthropic, OpenAI, and all the other big AI startups are built off the back of hundreds of billions in capital investment, and they're linked to even greater amounts of forward-looking investment in data center buildout, chips, and other infrastructure spend. At some point, that return has to pay off, the profits have to materialize, or the bubble pops. Maybe AGI arrives, maybe the economy crashes, who knows?

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