Artificial Intelligence

Investors have poured billions into using artificial intelligence to discover new drugs, and 2026 is the first real test of whether AI-designed medicines actually helps patients. The boom has genuinely transformed the search for molecules — but that was never the costly, failure-prone part of making a medicine, and there AI has so far had little to add. Capital, and the public subsidies have not yet priced the difference, writes Michael A. Santoro.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s argument that businesses need to be able to easily switch between artificial intelligence models is correct but elides the fact,...

The competitiveness of the artificial intelligence market at first glance masks how investment arrangements and partnerships between the largest players risks undermining their incentives to compete. Regulators must continue to monitor these arrangements for anticompetitive effects, writes Shishene Jing.

In new research, Christos Makridis and Andrew Johnston find that industries exposed to generative AI are seeing an increase in production, employment, and wages. However, the majority of AI-driven revenue growth is channelled back to capital as profits, rather than to workers.

An accounting rule introduced by the Financial Accounting Standards Board in 2016 was designed to address a flaw in the previous regime that contributed to the 2008 Financial Crisis. However, this same rule is enabling the circuit of investments that flows from Big Tech companies to artificial intelligence startups, whose increased valuation from these investments increases the value of the Big Tech companies, which they can then reinvest in the AI startups. The risk is an AI bubble that, if it pops, will also blow up Americans’ savings, writes Hera Hyeonseo Lee.

Artificial intelligence coding agents provide enormous value to consumers for very low fees. But the market is quickly shrinking with Anthropic in the lead. Only competition, and requiring Big Tech to build agents rather than buy them, will continue to let AI’s value flow to consumers. As such, the courts should ban SpaceX’s recently proposed acquisition of Cursor, writes Ketan Ahuja.

Artificial intelligence will change the market for economic consultants, likely reducing overall demand and shifting workers to current clients’ in-house units. However, both consulting firms and clients are still studying how to deploy AI, and there may yet be new opportunities for consultants as AI changes the broader economy, write Mona Birjandi and Mery Zadeh.

Anthropic has formed an exclusive artificial intelligence consortium to use its general purpose artificial intelligence model, Claude Mythos, to identify and fix vulnerabilities in critical internet and digital infrastructure. Madhavi Singh warns this consortium, called Project Glasswing, could contravene antitrust law and argues for regulatory oversight to ensure that it does not become a front for an illegal cartel.

In new research, Yoan Hermstrüwer and David Imhof analyze how AI can help antitrust authorities predict cartels by assessing international bidding data in countries with similar legal and market structures.

India is working on legislating new competition rules to govern artificial intelligence and other tech markets. But recommendations from a recent report by the Competition Commission of India suggest it might revert to old competition standards that will likely prove ineffectual in governing the new AI market, writes Abhineet Nayyar.