AI Opinion & Analysis
I want to make a small, cranky request on behalf of clear thinking everywhere: stop calling everything an agent. The word has been stretched so far that it now means anything from a genuinely autonomous system to a chatbot that calls one API. When a word means everything, it means nothing, and the fuzziness is not an accident. It is marketing.
Every executive survey says AI budgets are going up. A quieter set of numbers says most of that money is not paying off. Only about a quarter of enterprise AI initiatives deliver the ROI they promised. That gap is the most interesting, and least discussed, story in corporate AI, because the reason for it is almost never the thing everyone blames.
Read more: The uncomfortable truth about AI ROI in the enterprise
There was no dramatic moment, no single announcement, no headline that said it plainly. But somewhere in 2026, without a parade, open-weight models stopped being the scrappy underdog and became the default sensible choice for a huge slice of real work. It was a quiet war, and the open side won more of it than anyone expected.
The AI safety conversation is obsessed with the ceiling: the smartest model, the frontier, the hypothetical superintelligence. I think we are watching the wrong number. The change that will actually reshape the world this decade is not that the best model got smarter. It is that a good-enough model got almost free.
Read more: Cheaper AI is more dangerous than smarter AI, and nobody is talking about it
The most important AI story of the next year will not be a model release. It will be a court ruling. The lawsuits over what these models were trained on, the New York Times against OpenAI, Getty against Stability, are entering decisive phases, and the question they answer will quietly reshape the entire industry. I have a side, and I want to explain it honestly.
Read more: Who owns the words your AI trained on? The courts are about to decide.