Synthetic Minds | AI Is Becoming a Utility: Hard to Stop, Easy to Switch

Synthetic Minds | AI Is Becoming a Utility: Hard to Stop, Easy to Switch

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When a $25 Billion Fine is a Toll

The most important switch in artificial intelligence is not the one that turns it off. It is the one that moves a company from one model to another, and I believe it should be cheap enough that no frontier lab can hold customers to ransom.

Replit, the coding company, moved most of its AI spending from Anthropic to OpenAI after a discount of more than 30% on a contract worth over $100 million a year. At Rippling, Anthropic's share of coding work fell from 57% to 18% as OpenAI's rose from 16% to 52%.

Intelligence is becoming a utility, and like energy it is difficult to stop but easy to switch between providers. A business whose workflows let it swap the model underneath, through a router such as OpenRouter, rarely needs to stop anything. That shrinks the frontier labs' moat, which is likely why Anthropic has set up an AI services company with Blackstone and Goldman Sachs, selling work far harder to copy than a model.

A fine is a toll booth

Big tech, by contrast, is almost impossible to switch off, because a fine costs it less than following the rules. In Finland, police are investigating a planned Google data center site where forest was cleared before the environmental assessments were complete, and the likely outcome is a corporate fine.

In New Mexico, a judge ordered Meta to pay $25 billion for deceiving Facebook users about their privacy, and its shares traded 2% higher afterward. I see that as the cost of doing business the way Meta does business.

The rat race between the United States and China rewards exactly that habit of moving fast and breaking things. Until governments hold companies and their leaders accountable, regulation works like a toll booth on a toll road, and society pays the real bill. What is a penalty worth when the market reads it as a receipt?

Sometimes the switch-off is the system working

The companies that do get switched off are the ones without Meta's deep pockets. Character.AI, an app many young people relied on, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, citing legal, regulatory and operational pressures, and may be wound down. Character.AI and Google had settled a lawsuit from the mother of a 14-year-old who alleged a chatbot contributed to his suicide.

A service like that going dark is not necessarily a bad thing. It is the process working, far too slowly, so a similar company will likely fill the gap. Society is learning, but slowly.

Nobody built a switch for the worker

Companies are not waiting for automation to pay off. GXO is taking Agility's humanoid robots to two more warehouses, although its chief executive has said humanoids have not yet paid back across 45 pilots. The people whose jobs go to AI and automation deserve help through the transition, because a sense of purpose can disappear almost overnight. Whether that means a basic income or retraining grants like Singapore's S$4,000 top-up for workers over 40 is unclear and needs a global debate.

Any transition plan also assumes people want to make the crossing, and some will refuse it. Bill Gates said that "a lot of humanity may choose not to live at the technological frontier," like the Amish, and I expect that to produce parallel communities. Which of your people would choose that life, and what would you owe them?

What no model can supply

If the intelligence beneath your business can be swapped in weeks, what do you offer that cannot be?

The answer cannot be the model, because Intelligence-as-a-Service is a good thing that, used correctly, improves every application built on it. What it cannot supply is the judgment, empathy and creativity that remain, hopefully for a long time, uniquely human.

If your leadership team meets before the year is out, the Intelligence Age Leadership Program gives them one question to answer together: what they offer once the intelligence underneath can be swapped.

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Thank you.
Mark