AI’s free-for-all era may be coming to an end—as companies start counting the cost

Welcome to Eye on AI. Beatrice Nolan here. In today’s issue: Business leaders are confronting AI spending. Chat GPT’s market share falls below 50% Top Google Gemini executive leaves for Open AI Americans want legal protection around AI interactions. I’m in Paris this week at one of Europe’s largest tech conferences, Viva Tech, where concerns about “sovereign AI” are front and center. The U.S. government’s move to abruptly shut down foreign access to Anthropic’s powerful Mythos-tier models last week has been a stark example of Europe’s technological dependence on America—and what happens if the U.S. decides to pull the plug. Conversations on stage and off have been focused on what AI sovereignty actually means and how Europe can achieve meaningful AI independence. The other question on the table: AI spend. After two years of near-unrestrained experimentation, companies are starting to seriously question how much they’re spending on AI—and what they’re actually getting back. Corporate leaders across industries are now being confronted with ballooning AI costs as employees attempt to obey directives for widespread AI adoption. Uber recently burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in four months, and its COO said AI spend is getting harder to justify. Last month, one consultant told Axios that a client burned through half a billion dollars in a single month after failing to cap AI usage for employees. The spending reality check Even inside companies building the technology, there’s a growing sense that the free-for-all phase might be coming to an end—at least for some customers. Peter DeSantis, SVP at Amazon, said this kind of cost shock is a normal phase of new technology adoption, with companies now moving from experimentation to figuring out how to control usage and budgets. “Just like every technology, when we first launched the cloud, some of our most successful customers were delighted by the agility… but many of