Tech giants battle for AI power as warnings grow

The week has been marked by a price war among the major AI companies. Anthropic cut the price of its newest Claude model by up to 40 percent, while Microsoft gathered chat, coding and AI agents in one app to win business customers back from none other than Anthropic. Both show how quickly the competition for companies' AI budgets is intensifying.

At the same time, more and more cases are about control rather than price. Amazon has shut Meta's new AI agent Muse out of its online store. Muse can shop on the user's behalf, and the case shows that the tech giants are already fighting over who owns access to customers when AI starts shopping for us.

Warnings of overheating

Not everyone is equally enthusiastic about the pace. The head of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City warns that the AI industry is becoming so large and intertwined that a collapse could threaten the entire economy, just as happened during the financial crisis. The warning comes as Oracle has had to declare force majeure on a huge AI data center in New Mexico because construction is delayed, which has sent ripples through the market for loans to AI infrastructure.

The pressure is also visible in Denmark. The enormous global pace of investment in new data centers is moving faster than the green transition can keep up with, and it could force the government to compromise on Denmark's green profile.

Both competition and cooperation

There are, however, also signs that the great powers are trying to find common ground. The US and China have begun formal talks on safety in artificial intelligence, although experts warn that the trade war and mistrust between the countries make cooperation difficult.

The picture that emerges is therefore twofold. On the one hand, a business world that invests and competes at a pace that can barely be followed. On the other, growing concern about whether it is all sustainable, both economically and for the green transition.

For ordinary employees and businesses, the advice is to keep an eye on prices, because the price war between providers may make AI tools cheaper to use in the near future. At the same time, it is worth following who actually controls your data and purchases when AI agents get more freedom, and remembering that warnings from central banks don't mean development will stop, but that it may become more unstable along the way.