Tech
The AI Correction Will Not Be Evenly Distributed | Computer Weekly
When the numbers coming out of the biggest AI companies get reported, the coverage is almost always the same: revenue up, growth accelerating, the boom is real. What almost nobody asks is what kind of revenue it is. In AI right now, that question is being skipped entirely. It’s the only one that matters.
Any investor who has sat across from a founder in a pitch meeting knows that headline revenue is just the starting point. The real questions come after: Is this B2B or B2C? Is it contracted or casual? Does the use case suggest land-and-expand potential, or is this customer already at their ceiling? Is the product embedded in something the customer cannot easily stop doing, or is it a nice-to-have competing with shrinking budgets and fading attention? These questions are table stakes at the startup level. They have almost completely vanished from the conversation about the companies now defining the AI landscape.
Take Anthropic and OpenAI. By most coverage, OpenAI is the dominant player – larger revenue, broader adoption, a product that has become genuinely cultural. That may all be true. But when you ask what colour that revenue is, the picture gets more complicated. OpenAI’s CFO confirmed that roughly 75% of its revenue comes from consumer subscriptions. ChatGPT has somewhere in the range of 800 million weekly active users – and only about 5% are paying subscribers. That is an enormous base resting on consumer willingness to pay for something most people still access for free, competing with curiosity, with free alternatives, and with whatever captures attention next. Consumer subscriptions cancel quietly and they cancel fast.
Anthropic’s revenue is built on integration
Anthropic’s revenue is smaller. But look at where it comes from. Approximately 80% comes from enterprise customers. Over 500 companies now spend more than $1 million annually on Claude. Eight of the Fortune 10 are customers. Claude Code, a tool embedded directly into developer workflows, went from zero to $2.5 billion in annualized revenue in roughly nine months. The result is a monetization gap that rarely gets discussed: Anthropic generates roughly $211 per monthly user while OpenAI generates roughly $25 per weekly user. That is not a small difference. It reflects what happens when revenue is built on integration rather than attention.
When a business has embedded AI into its compliance process, its coding infrastructure, or its data operations, switching is not a casual decision. It is an engineering project, a procurement process, and an organizational headache. That friction is not a bug; it is the entire point. It is what makes a dollar of Anthropic’s revenue structurally different from a dollar of consumer subscription revenue, regardless of the size of the number attached to it.
Lessons from SaaS
This is not a new lesson. The 2022 SaaS correction made it visible at a category level. When pressure hit, it did not hit evenly. Public SaaS multiples fell an average of 67% from their 2021 peak – but within that average, some companies saw multiples fall 90% while infrastructure and security tools largely held. The companies that took the worst hits were not necessarily bad businesses with bad products. They had the wrong colour revenue for a pressure environment. The market treated them as equivalent until the moment it didn’t.
AI will produce extreme divison
AI will produce a more extreme version of that divergence. Two reasons. First, the hype cycle is larger than anything SaaS produced – the speed of adoption, the scale of investment, and the cultural footprint of these products have created a wider gap between perceived value and embedded value than we have seen before. Second, the consumer-versus-enterprise variance is wider. SaaS was predominantly a business product. AI has gone consumer in a way SaaS never fully did, which means a much larger share of current AI revenue sits in the category most vulnerable to pressure. When that pressure arrives, the disaggregation will be severe and it will not look like a uniform correction. It will look like two completely different industries reporting results in the same earnings cycle.
The boom-or-bust framing that dominates AI coverage is the wrong question. Some of this is a boom. Some of it is not. The difference will not show up in total revenue figures until it is too late to be useful information. The question worth asking now is simpler and harder: which revenue survives pressure? That answer depends entirely on use case, contract structure, and how deeply the tool is actually embedded in how people and businesses work. We do not yet have a clean public way to measure it. That is exactly the problem.
Judah Taub is the founder and managing partner of Hetz Ventures, an Israeli early-stage venture capital firm specializing in cybersecurity, data, and AI infrastructure.
Bose has three new speakers to spice up your home listening. The company’s new “Lifestyle Collection”—designed with a snazzy fabric-wrapped grille and gentle curves—includes the Lifestyle Ultra Speaker, Lifestyle Ultra Subwoofer, and Lifestyle Ultra Soundbar. All of them can be connected to multiple units and third-party speakers via AirPlay and Google Cast for a better multi-room audio experience.
These audio products mark a “reentering” into the home speaker space for the company, bringing back the iconic Lifestyle lineup that originally debuted in 1990—known for simplicity and ease of use—which Bose subsequently discontinued in 2022.
To no surprise, Bose says the Ultra Soundbar is the “best soundbar we have ever made,” and that the Ultra Speaker might even be one of the company’s best in its storied history. The wireless speaker starts at $299, with a $349 limited-edition model in Driftwood Sand; the soundbar costs $1,099, and the subwoofer is $899. They’re available for preorder now and go on sale May 15.
These Wi-Fi-enabled speakers support AirPlay, Google Cast, Spotify Connect, and, uniquely, are the first to integrate with Alexa+ (in the US only), allowing you to ask Amazon’s chatbot to play music through the speakers via voice commands. There’s also Bluetooth support, and even an auxiliary input for connecting the Ultra Speaker to a turntable.
You can group two Lifestyle Ultra Speakers into a stereo system in the Bose app, or group them all together for a home theater system. Sadly, if you hoped to use it as a surround system with your existing Bose soundbar, the company says it’s only backward compatible with the Bass Module 700. And with the new Lifestyle Ultra Soundbar, it can only be used as a wired connection. For multi-room audio, the company has passed those grouping duties to the Google Home app for Google Cast technology, or Apple’s AirPlay for iOS users. Speaking of the app, there’s a redesigned onboarding process that purportedly makes setting up all of these speakers a breeze.
On the audio front, the Ultra Speaker notably features an upward-firing driver for Dolby Atmos–like spatial audio, along with two front-facing drivers. (It doesn’t seem to support Dolby Atmos Music at this time.) The company is also touting its CleanBass technology, which pairs Bose’s QuietPort acoustic opening with the woofer for deep sound that performs better than its size suggests, though we’ll have to hear it for ourselves to see if it lives up to Bose’s claims.
Armed with some Python and a white-hot sense of injustice, one medical student spent six months trying to figure out whether an algorithm trashed his job application.
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Google AI workers in the UK have launched a pioneering unionisation bid to end use of their technology by Israel and the US military.
The British-based Google DeepMind employees – who aim to become the first frontier artificial intelligence (AI) lab worldwide to unionise – sent a letter to management this week to request recognition of the Communication Workers Union (CWU) and Unite the Union as their official representatives. In a vote of CWU members at DeepMind, 98% backed the move.
John Chadfield, CWU national officer for tech workers, said: “This is a really important moment where tech workers at Google’s frontier AI lab are connecting with some of the most oppressed people in communities around the world in meaningful ways, based on foundational values of solidarity and trade unionism.
“By exercising their rights to collectivise they are in a strong position to demand their employer stop circling the ethical drain of military-industrial contracts, echoing the sentiment of many working people in the UK and elsewhere.”
The workers are part of a wider campaign, with DeepMind staff globally considering in-person protests and “research strikes” – where they abstain from work expected to significantly improve core products such as the Gemini AI assistant.
Google employees have previously protested the ethics of contracts such as Project Nimbus, a joint programme with Amazon to make cloud computing and AI tools available to Israel during its campaign in Gaza, which saw upwards of 70,000 dead. Meanwhile, Maven, a US government project from which Google withdrew in 2019 after staff protests, has reportedly been used in targeting in the Iran war.
The unionising DeepMind workers are seeking an end to use of Google AI by Israel and the US military. Their demands also include restoring a scrapped commitment not to make AI weapons or surveillance tools, the creation of an independent ethics oversight body, and the individual right to refuse to contribute to projects on moral grounds.
A DeepMind employee said: “We don’t want our AI models complicit in violations of international law, but they already are aiding Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. Even if our work is only used for administrative purposes, as leadership has repeatedly told us, it is still helping make genocide cheaper, faster and more efficient. That must end immediately, as must harm to Iranians and human lives anywhere.”
Google recently agreed to let the US Department of Defense use its AI models for classified work, a move opposed by over 600 employees. Google staff worry how the technology will be used given the deal could reportedly open the door to autonomous weapons and mass surveillance of US citizens, red-line issues that previously saw the Pentagon impose restrictions on competitor Anthropic.
The unionisation bid aims to gain representation for at least 1,000 staff tied to Google DeepMind’s London office. The employees’ letter gave management 10 working days to voluntarily recognise the CWU and Unite, or take other steps such as agreeing to mediated negotiations, before a formal legal process is launched to force recognition. Google DeepMind is headquartered in London, but has about a dozen offices across North America and Europe.
“I hope that recourse to the statutory procedure will not prove necessary,” CWU official Chadfield wrote in the letter. “We look forward to working with you in a spirit of co-operation on behalf of the workforce.”
The CWU branch for DeepMind staff is United Tech and Allied Workers.
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