Chasing the Headlines
What happens when technology occupies space that once belonged to people?
Like everyone else, I open my phone to a flood of AI news. AI passed another exam, wrote a symphony, is coming for your job and your doctor and your kids. Some of these headlines are, of course, hype. And some of them are legitimate breakthroughs.
The companies at the center of it all will tell you, without irony, that they are building the most consequential technology in human history. The latest headlines are that the leading companies are now filing to go public, which means that whoever else they answer to, they will soon answer first to shareholders.
The hype is currently the entire foundation of the American stock market. AI represents nearly 45 percent of the S&P 500’s market cap.
Around all the hype is a singular bet (no pun intended). At some point, AI will permeate every aspect of your life. It will draft your work and launch your business. It will be your companion when you are lonely, and for some people it will be their lover.
SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic all filed their IPOs. Together they could pull more than two hundred billion dollars from a market that raised forty-five billion in all of last year. They are each valued at around a trillion dollars. Anthropic reportedly lost around fourteen billion dollars in 2026. Nobody cares about this year’s earnings. They are buying the permeation and the idea that these companies will be the infrastructure of the entire global economy and the common thread through all of our lives. And of course, there is evidence for that trend.
With AI, however, this omnipresence is both the promise and the threat. A tool that can be your confidant at three in the morning is genuinely valuable to an elderly person with nobody around. It is also genuinely corrosive to the man avoiding human relationships which he struggles to navigate.
The technology doesn’t decide when it is acting helpful or harmfully. It is whether you have the “AI fitness” to use it in balance, the way you would with anything that can comfort and consume in equal measure. That ability to use this technology and keep a semblance of your own self is what I discussed with Todd Essig.
Going public hands ownership of these companies to the rest of us, our pensions and index funds and retirement accounts. It also strips the mission down to one legally enforceable line: return value to shareholders. The company you can now own has no obligation to ask whether you have the fitness to use its product well. It has every obligation to keep you using it.
So with the valuations and the many headlines, the real question becomes are the incentives misaligned with being beneficial to humanity. We have to watch whether anyone building these things designs them in a way that points back toward people, or whether the only metric that survives the IPO parade is how long engagement lasts. A great deal of money is about to ride on us not being able to distinguish between AI that helps and AI that harms.