The make-or-break moment for the AI ​​industry has arrived

today Decryptionlet’s talk about the looming abyss of AI monetization, and whether some of the biggest companies in this space can become real, profitable businesses before they walk away from it.

My guest today is Hayden Field, who’s the chief AI correspondent here Edge. We’ve been keeping a close eye on both Anthropic and OpenAI, and how those two companies in particular tell us a lot about the AI ​​industry in 2026.

You’ve probably heard some version of the monetization cliff story before. The largest AI companies were built on the back of hundreds of billions in capital investment, and are tied to even greater amounts of forward-looking investment in building data centers, chips, and other infrastructure spending. At some point, profits must be made, or the bubble will burst. Maybe artificial general intelligence will arrive, maybe the economy will collapse, who knows.

You’ve heard me ask a version of this question to dozens of CEOs here on this show, and most of them have implied that the bubble is bursting — they believe some companies will fail in spectacular fashion, some will succeed, and the opportunities, especially the money, are simply too great to ignore. We do it, whether we want to or not, the market depends on it.

So the last few weeks seemed like a very important inflection point, as both Anthropic and OpenAI began to respond to the reality of needing to go public — the need to make money,

The catalyst for this change has been AI agents, and products like Claude Code and Cowork, as well as open source OpenClaw and OpenAI’s Codex, have radically changed the way these companies think about their resources. This is starting to impact their behavior – the products they support or suddenly discontinue, the restrictions they impose on customers, and the money they are willing to spend towards their next big milestone.

This is because agents are valuable to customers today, but agents also use more computing. So the way people use proxies is to burn tokens at a faster rate than these companies expected, and that makes them make difficult decisions.

We saw this clearly last month when OpenAI suddenly… It killed the Sora video generating appabandoning Disney’s billion-dollar licensing deal in the process. Why? It costs a lot to run, and OpenAI needs the computing needed for the Codex. We saw that again just last week, when Anthropic decided that it would no longer allow Claude users to burn compute resources using the OpenClaw proxy framework through a standard subscription plan, instead forcing those users to On pay-as-you-go planswhich costs much more.

As you’ll hear Hayden explain here, these are glimpses into a make-or-break moment for the AI ​​industry, as Anthropic and OpenAI head toward two of the biggest IPOs in history. The pressure on these companies to make money has never been more intense.

The forecasts made by these companies, which were just this week leaked into Wall Street Journaltell a story of astonishing growth, reaching hundreds of billions in revenue and profitability by the end of the decade. But the most important questions now are: Can AI companies achieve this, and what compromises will they make to reach this goal and avoid crashing and burning?

Okay: edge Hayden Field, senior policy correspondent, talks about the abyss of AI monetization and the race to profitability. Here we are.

If you’d like to read more about what we discussed in this episode, check out these links:

_{Questions or comments about this episode? Follow us at decoder@theverge.com. We really read every email!}