Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman said AI and tech companies should offer to build community structures beyond just data centers they need.
Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman said the AI industry has to market data centers better.
He said that Microsoft President Brad Smith's plan is what the industry should have been saying all along.
Feldman said the industry needs to show it will be a better neighbor.
Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman says the AI industry has done a poor job of selling data centers to the public. He has a different message in mind, modeled after Microsoft President Brad Smith.
"These can be clean, they can make jobs, they can be good for communities," Feldman said during a recent episode of Harry Stebbing's "20VC" podcast. "We can do this thoughtfully."
Feldman, fresh off the chipmaker's blockbuster IPO, said AI companies need to be better neighbors when approaching communities where they plan to build massive facilities to house the thousands of advanced chips needed to power AI models.
"There's no reason why we can't add these to communities and have the community benefit from it," he said. "And we have to do some thinking, we have all the heavy equipment out there —build a football field for the local school, build a school, add a church or a synagogue to the community. We can be good neighbors at very, very low cost."
Data centers also need to be better stewards of local resources, Feldman said, and AI and tech companies should pick up the tab, not taxpayers.
"In some cases, they tried to pawn off costs on the local community or use outdated financial arrangements that left the community holding the bag," Feldman wrote in an email to Business Insider. "And in others they were wasteful of resources. This is not cool. And none of this needs to be the case."
Feldman said one way companies can better serve their communities is by building closed-loop facilities that reduce water usage. Last June, Business Insider reported that 40% of the nation's planned and existing data centers are in some of the US's most water-stressed areas.
The Cerebras CEO cited Smith's plan, "Building Community-First AI Infrastructure," as a model for how the industry should be talking about its plan. Smith outlined five steps Microsoft would follow in developing its AI infrastructure, including paying its own way to ensure residents don't face higher electricity prices, reducing its water consumption, creating jobs, and partnering with local nonprofits and universities on job training.
"Whether it was canals, railroads, the electrical grid, or the interstate highway system, each era produced its own conflicts over who bore the burdens of progress," Smith wrote. "One enduring lesson is that successful infrastructure buildouts will only progress when communities feel that the gains outweigh the costs."
Data centers aren't the only thing hurting AI's popularity.
Polling shows Americans are concerned about AI-related job displacement. A March Quinnipiac University poll found that 7 out of 10 Americans believe that advancements in AI will lead to a decrease in the number of job opportunities.
It's why OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and others in the industry have chafed at the growing number of companies whose executives have cited AI as their motivation for recent layoffs. Like Altman, Feldman also sees "AI washing," or blaming the unpopular technology for job cuts, as afoot.
"I think to date, most of the layoffs were 'AI-washed,'" Feldman said. "They were because we did boneheaded hiring during COVID. It is actually because a great deal of productivity gains have occurred over the years that we're just now harvesting."
Feldman said that companies that don't figure out how to harness AI-driven productivity gains will be outpaced. He said Cerebras wants to hire more engineers, not fewer.
"If you are an engineering organization that can't see how to take advantage of vastly more productive engineers, I don't think you're long for this world," he said. "I mean, the list of things I want our engineers to do is 50 times as much as we have engineers."
Boris Cherny, creator of Claude Code at Anthropic, said he's tired of the term "vibe coding."
Business Insider surveyed readers to find alternatives to the popular techie term.
Many readers suggested humorous or derogatory descriptions for AI-generated code.
After Claude Code creator Boris Cherny told Business Insider at Anthropic's developer conference that he'd grown tired of the phrase "vibe coding," we asked readers for input on a new name. Readers largely answered with one word: "slop."
"Vibe coding" has become a go-to techie term for telling AI to write code. To solicit ideas for a new term, Business Insider put out a survey asking for suggestions and about how people vibe code.
A few hundred responses rolled in, split about 50-50 between people who said they'd vibe coded within the last six months and those who hadn't. A clear majority of readers used the survey to bash or belittle the topic at hand, showing how many people feel negative sentiment toward the technology and anxiety about employment.
By far the largest group of responses poked at the new tech with the term "slop," which boomed in use over the last few years as the public began to grapple with text, images, and videos created by generative AI. Readers suggested we do the same to describe AI code, with "slopcoding," "slopmaxxing," or "slop spitting." Some other entries include "slopping," "slopify," and "Slop as a Service (SaaS)."
"Clanker," a derogatory term for AI machines and a "Star Wars" reference, also made a few appearances in the data. Readers suggested "vulnerability creation" — a nod to AI code's potential for cybersecurity breaches — and "garbage generation." Readers also suggested terms like "cheapskating coding" and "proscamming.
Two responses, demonstrating fears over AI's impact on the job market, included "unemployment." One suggested replacing the term with "job destruction."
In addition, one respondent wrote that they hadn't used a vibe coding tool "because I actually know how to write code." Another suggested "prompt and pray," writing that they'd used the tools to make a "garbage version" of two basic video games.
The responses weren't entirely negative. "Prompt coding," "autocode," and "token shaping" showed up among the suggestions, as did "speech to code," "choreo-coding," and "agentic engineering."
Business Insider sent over a few reader suggestions to Cherny, and nothing took. He's OK with "autocoding" and "agentic engineering," which, like "vibe coding," was coined by Andrej Karpathy, an OpenAI founding member who recently announced he's joining Anthropic. Cherny said neither has quite the right ring.
One reader, who said they mainly use Claude Code for auditing their homelab's security, said they call that work "Claudits." They wrote: "'Vibe Coding' means so many things. Are you building, designing, auditing, cleaning?"
That may be the main reason it's hard to find a replacement — "vibe" is already a catch-all term.
Now, a coalition of tech and labor organizations has launched a pilot program to retrain and upskill entry-level workers having difficulty finding a job in an automated world and tech workers who have lost their jobs because of artificial intelligence.
The effort, dubbed AI Dividend and led by the Fund for Guaranteed Income, a labor rights organization, and What We Will, a tech worker advocacy group, is providing a monthly stipend of up to $1,000 to a cohort of nearly 50 participants.
The initiative, which began payouts in late March, has $300,000 in initial funding and will distribute $3 million over the course of one year.
Kaitlin Cort, founder of What We Will, and Nicholas Salazar, executive director of the Fund for a Guaranteed Income (F4GI), told Business Insider that their goal is to test what a safety net for widespread AI disruption could look like.
"We're hearing from workers of all levels that they need support," Salazar said. "And we know that without resources, or when facing homelessness like some of our participants are, it is very difficult to invest in retraining."
"The goal is to help participants transition and find another job," Salazar said. "Without the support, they could fall into permanent unemployment."
A shrinking mobility ladder
A data scientist and software engineer who has spent years mentoring through coding bootcamps and nonprofit training programs, Cort said that pathways into tech that offer upward mobility are narrowing.
"In the past year, we're definitely seeing a lot of changes in the industry and a tightening job market, especially for entry-level workers," Cort said.
SignalFire, a platform that tracks over 650 million professionals and 80 million organizations, wrote in its 2025 "State of Tech Talent Report" that entry-level is "collapsing" and that new grad hiring in Big Tech is down over 50% in 2024 from pre-pandemic levels in 2019.
Cort said there is now a "K-shaped labor market" where demand is growing for senior workers with AI expertise, while junior-level software roles are disappearing. The result, she says, is that computer science graduates are left scrambling for jobs.
"What people need is not just video courses," Cort said, referring to retraining programs. "They need to have a project — ideally with real users — and AI-related job experience to be added to their résumé. So much of that requires in-person mentorship and training."
The UBI debate
A project Dean Grey is working on with the AI Commons is a high-quality chatbot that helps newly unemployed individuals navigate their next steps.
Dean Grey
There are many vocal critics of UBI in Silicon Valley. Marc Andreessen wrote in 2023 that UBI would turn people into "zoo animals to be farmed by the state." OpenAI CEO Sam Altman spent $14 million of his own money on a UBI study and no longer believes it is a good plan.
Dean Grey, an entry-level tech worker struggling to land a new job since his previous contract ended, however, called the monthly checks he receives through the AI Dividend "amazing" and "such a boon."
Grey, a trucker before entering the tech industry, told Business Insider that he had gone through multiple bootcamps and a short-term contract, only to find that his skills couldn't land him a position after hundreds of applications.
"Honestly, this program is still so new, and the curriculum is still developing, but right away I got a real sense of community," said Grey. "And to be honest, just to have a structure again, some guidance, and community allowed me to move forward with some confidence."
As part of the program, Grey is creating an AI chatbot to help newly unemployed people navigate their next steps and answer questions about healthcare, unemployment benefits, and networking opportunities.
A targeted 'cash plus' model
The AI Dividend program is already working with hundreds of laid-off workers, including about 270 laid-offOracle employees.
Cort said many share a similar challenge: Their experience doesn't match what the current market demands.
"They might have been working on a specific part of a code base that is Java-based and actually quite old for many, many years," Cort said. "And they're not exposed to the new advancements."
Philip Luck, director of the CSIS Economics Program, said it is increasingly hard for governments to balance their budgets and that it is difficult to see a scenario in which any government could make a monthly payout to a large swath of the population.
"I'm 1000% for scaling up unemployment insurance and anti-poverty policies," Luck said, adding that these assistances make sense for people who need to learn new skills or are nearing retirement, and need help getting through broad transitions.
"It's hard for me to see an economy where a majority of labor is not needed," Luck added. "We only have so much money, and we should channel it toward those who need it the most, through really effective, smart, and well-designed means testing."
Salazar said that the AI Dividend is often seen as a UBI program, but it does more than hand out cash.
"UBI is universal, unconditional, and it's supposed to be permanent," he said. "But this program is actually targeted right now for AI-displaced workers, which means it's conditional and it's time-limited to between six and 12 months."
Grey said that there are always people who would take advantage of any program, including UBI, but he is optimistic about its existence in some shape or form going forward.
"It might just mean that we transition to a new way of finding purpose, whether that's not in what we do for occupation, but how we express ourselves or what we do creatively," Grey said. "I don't think that we'll run out of ways to find purpose in life."
Sam Barnes/Sportsfile for Web Summit via Getty Images
European startups like Legora and Lovable are challenging US tech dominance with rapid growth.
AI advancements and improved capital access are enabling Europe's tech scene to thrive globally.
European tech hubs like Stockholm attract global talent, weakening Silicon Valley's long-standing pull.
Call it Europemaxxing. Call it a Scandinavian surge. Whatever is happening, Europe's tech scene is feeling hot.
From Legora to Lovable, Klarna to Yann LeCunn's new AMI Labs, a new generation of European startups is bedding in and defying the pull of Silicon Valley. In some areas, they're matching or pulling in front of their US rivals.
Swedish AI legal startup Legora, a challenger to US-headquartered Harvey, says it counts 20% of the 100 highest-grossing US law firms among its customers, and last month hit a major revenue milestone. The Swedish vibe-coding titan Lovable, valued at $6.6 billion, recently saw its recurring revenue jump 33% in a month — and now it's looking for acquisitions.
"A structural shift is happening in the European business landscape," Lovable CEO Anton Osika told Business Insider. "Europe has a long history of producing deep technical talent but was traditionally viewed as weaker in growing companies to global scale."
What's behind the shift? Founders and VCs told Business Insider that it's a combination of AI, access to capital, and the flywheel effect from established European tech companies like Spotify and Klarna. And it's changing how tech talent flows across the Atlantic.
"It is not recency bias," George Robson, a partner at the US-headquartered VC firm Sequoia, told Business Insider. "Something has genuinely shifted — and I think it has been building for a lot longer than the last 12 months of headlines suggest."
AI shakes up scaling
For decades, the pattern was similar: a company born in Europe would grow, struggle to scale beyond a certain point, and then move to the US. DeepMind and Darktrace are some of the biggest companies to have ended up under the purview of the US, one way or another.
"I think there's still a huge issue with scale-up capital," Douglas Brion, CEO of London-based manufacturing startup Matta, told Business Insider. While access to seed and early-stage capital is still strong, Brion said, it remains challenging later.
Yet AI may be shaking up startup scaling laws, both in terms of the speed at which they can grow and the amount of capital needed to do so. Tech companies worldwide are shifting toward leaner teams that use AI to improve efficiency. That can mean lower overheads for startups, allowing funding to go further.
"What's changing is the underlying logic of why companies had to move in the first place," said Lovable's Osika. He predicts a "virtuous cycle" in which AI reduces the need for large amounts of capital to scale, leading more startups to succeed in Europe and VC money to follow. "We're at the very beginning of that shift," he said.
"Large language models, and the infrastructure around them, have compressed the timeline from research idea to product in a way that plays to European strengths," Sequoia's Robson told Business Insider. "Europe has always had exceptional research depth — now that depth converts to product faster than it ever did before."
Capital flows
US startups raised six times more than those in Europe did last year, but there are signs that access to capital is improving. The median European VC fund has tripled in size since 2016, from $32 million to $105 million, according to data from Atomico.
Following his departure from Meta, AI researcher LeCun announced in March that he raised $1 billion for his new Paris-based AI startup, AMI Labs. LeCun said the new company would be among the few frontier labs that are "neither Chinese nor American."
Alex Kendell, CEO of the London self-driving car company Wayve, said he was also "seeing a new market open up with AI" right now. "Europe has really strong research and technical talent, and this is now being matched with the capital and ambition to grow," he told Business Insider.
Wayve, led by Alex Kendell, raised one of the biggest-ever UK funding rounds.
Bloomberg/Getty Images
Kendell said Europe is still behind the US in terms of valuations and access to capital, but that he also sees encouraging signs of change.
"The best funds in the world are now wanting to invest in markets like the UK, and are setting up offices and general partners locally to make those investments," he said. "I think we're seeing those funds grow to a size and ambition where they want to globalize."
'Silicon Valley with a Scandinavian flair'
The upside of a European tech-aissance is that the continent may stop being a talent farm for US megacaps. Data from Revelio shows that more tech workers are now moving from the US to Europe than the other way around. It suggests Europe isn't just better at retaining talent, but also attracting more from the States.
"Five years ago, if you were a top AI researcher or a founding engineer and you wanted to work on the most consequential problems, you felt a genuine pull toward San Francisco," said Sequoia's Robson. "That pull has not disappeared, but it has weakened, because the problems are now being worked on in Paris and London and Zurich and Berlin too."
Stockholm has become something of a tech hub — one some like to refer to as "Silicon Valhalla." The founding place and headquarters of Spotify has given birth to a stable of tech companies — Lovable, Klarna, Legora — that are true challengers to their US rivals.
Adrian Parlow, director of product at Legora, recently moved from the US to join Legora in Stockholm. He describes the vibe as "Silicon Valley with a Scandinavian flair," which he said means low ego, hunger to grow, hunger to win.
Not everyone is fully sold on this idea. Paul Graham, the founder of YC, said this month that while Stockholm has potential, ambitious founders should still go to Silicon Valley.
There are other factors at play that may be both driving more talent into Europe and keeping it there.
"We know that the H1B visa thing is starting to drive people away," said Mike Smeed, managing director of London-based Inmotion Ventures, referring to Donald Trump's crackdown on the visa that thousands of tech workers obtain to work in the US each year. Data reviewed by Business Insider showed that H-1 B filings by tech giants such as Google and Amazon dropped sharply late last year.
Founder flywheel
Success often begets success, and several founders said this will be key to creating the European flywheel.
"You need early success examples to prove that the thing is possible," said Legora's Parlow. He cites Spotify and Klarna as big early successes that now inspire companies like Lovable and Legora. "And then, you know, maybe a few years from now, Legora is going to be the one the next founder is going to look at and be like, 'Oh, this is possible.'"
Sequoia's Robson said today's trend stems from a decade of compounding effects in which founders who have sold their startups put their experience and money back into the ecosystem.
"The generation of founders who built and exited European companies in the 2010s did not leave," he said. "They stayed, and they hired, and they backed the next generation. That flywheel is now spinning in a way it simply was not a decade ago."
And why not build in Europe? Some countries across the continent consistently rank among the highest in global quality-of-life rankings.
Yauhen Yerchak/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
"I would like to get as many international tech experts to Finland as possible," Finnish President Alexander Stubb told Politico on behalf of the Axel Springer Global Network. "The work-life balance is very good here. We are top of the world. Good schools, high living standards, comfortable life, safe in many ways."
InMotion Venture's Smeed says similar arguments can be made across other parts of Europe.
"The way of living is beautiful. So if you offer people the opportunity to stay and to grow, then of course they would want to do that," he said. "But you've got to set up the right environment for that to happen."
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Coco Gauff returns to the French Open to defend her title.
Robert Szaniszlo/NurPhoto via Reuters Connect
The second Grand Slam of the year has arrived on the clay courts of Roland Garros. We've scoured the global streaming options to highlight everything you need to know about where to watch the French Open, including free options.
In the US, coverage will be available across TNT and truTV and live streamable in full via HBO Max. TNT Sports coverage via HBO Max is also the go-to option in the UK, although most other European nations will need Eurosport to access live streams. One exception is the host nation, France, which will offer select content for free via France.TV (with some matches on Prime Video). Australia will carry the full tournament on Stan Sport, with select free coverage on 9Now. You can access streaming options from anywhere by using a VPN. Keep reading to learn additional worldwide viewing options and info about the tournament.
Where to watch the French Open for free
Certain countries will offer select free coverage of the French Open. In France, free streaming is available through France.TV. In Australia, free streaming options can be found on 9Now. Both services just require account creation if you don't already have one.
How to watch the French Open from anywhere
If you're away from the location where your streaming service works and still want to access your free streaming options, you can do so with a VPN. VPNs, or virtual private networks, are handy tools that let people temporarily change the digital location of their devices. They're especially popular among those looking to upgrade their cybersecurity or access their usual websites and apps while traveling abroad.
NordVPN is one of the best VPNs on the market. It's fast, easy to use, and offers an impressive selection of global servers. Plus, it comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee, so it's no sweat if you find that it's not helping you.
Where to watch the French Open in the US
The French Open is available across TNT and truTV in the US. The best way to live stream every moment of the Roland Garros action is through HBO Max. You'll need one of the ad-free tiers of service to access sports streaming. These plans start at $18.49 a month. You can also get HBO Max in some of the Disney Plus bundles.
If you'd prefer to watch on a service that carries other channels (in addition to TNT and truTV), then one of the best live TV streaming services will be able to help you out. After testing, DirecTV is our best overall pick right now, and you can catch TNT and truTV through one of the budget-friendly genre packs (in addition to all of the signature plans). DirecTV's MySports plan carries around 20 popular sports channels and unlocks access to ESPN Unlimited. MySports costs $65 a month, but new users can get $15 a month off their first two months after a five-day free trial.
Where to watch the French Open in the UK
TNT Sports will carry French Open coverage in the UK. Fans can live stream all coverage on HBO Max, the new home of TNT Sports. Subscriptions for TNT Sports access cost £31 a month, but you can usually find some monthly savings if you commit to a longer contract. If you were previously using Discovery Plus to live stream TNT Sports and haven't yet made the switch, you can log into HBO Max by using your Discovery credentials, and you should be all set to start watching.
Where to watch the French Open in France
France will offer extensive free French Open coverage for the host nation. Live streams will be available on France.TV, a free streaming option that just requires account creation to use. Select French Open coverage will be shown on Prime Video in France. While Prime Video is a paid option, the service usually offers a generous free trial for those who haven't had an account in quite some time or haven't had one at all.
Where to watch the French Open in Australia
Australians will be able to catch French Open action on 9Now and Stan Sport. 9Now is a free streaming option (you'll just need to create a login if you haven't already) with select coverage. If you want to watch every single match, you'll need a paid Stan Sport subscription. Stan costs $12 a month for the base plan, and then an extra $20 a month for the sports add-on. In total, this will run you $32 a month.
Where is the French Open?
The French Open is held at Stade Roland Garros in Paris. Court Philippe-Chatrier is where most of the biggest matches take place.
Who is playing in the first round?
The first round officially kicks off on Sunday, May 24. Tommy Paul, Novak Djokovic, Andrey Rublev, Alexander Zverev, Aryna Sabalenka, Jessica Pegula, Coco Gauff, Madison Keys, and Naomi Osaka are among the top players scheduled to compete on Sunday and Monday.
Note: VPN use is illegal in certain countries, and using VPNs to access region-locked streaming content may constitute a breach of the terms of use for some services. Business Insider does not endorse or condone the illegal use of VPNs.
Samuel Boivin; Ethan Swope/Bloomberg via Getty Images; Alyssa Powell/BI
I happened to be on the toilet both times everything changed.
The first was March 11, 2020, the day America's eyes were opened to COVID.
More than 4,000 people around the world had died before that date, but in the US, we were still ever so young and naive. It was a time when multiple media outlets were admonishing Andreessen Horowitz, not for extolling the virtues of "retardmaxxing" as the venture firm does these days, but for banning handshakes in its office to prevent the spread of the virus.
That all changed on Wednesday, March 11. That day, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic, the Dow Jones officially entered a bear market, Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson announced they had COVID, Donald Trump issued a travel ban on people traveling from Europe, and the NBA suspended its season after star center Rudy Gobert tested positive for the virus. I will never forget the queasy, giddy, horrifying shiver of realization I felt that evening — knowing that the world I knew had ended, and a new, unmooring and unmapped world had begun. March 11 was, as Wired later called it, "the moment that everything in American life changed — launching us into an uncertain future of unknown duration."
The second time I had that feeling was this past Wednesday. If the release of ChatGPT in November 2022 was akin to the first confirmed case of COVID in the US, in the full course of history, May 20, 2026, may be AI's "everything changed" moment.
It started with numbers so stupid big they seemed unreal. Chips giant Nvidia posted a record quarterly revenue of $81.6 billion, more than 26 times its revenue in the first quarter of 2020. The Wall Street Journal reported that Anthropic, which didn't even exist in 2020, was projecting its revenue to reach $10.9 billion next quarter, more than double the quarter before — a rate of growth faster than Zoom's in the pandemic.
Then there was the double whammy of OpenAI news. The Journal reported that the company, fresh off its legal victory against Elon Musk, is preparing to go public within weeks. While that broke, OpenAI said that one of its models had solved a famous geometry problem that had vexed mathematicians for 80 years. In the weepy announcement video, multiple OpenAI researchers and mathematicians look thunderstruck as they talk about losing sleep over the implications of what the bot had achieved.
The torrent continued that morning, when SpaceX filed to go public. Not only do its SEC filings reveal the path for Musk to become the world's first trillionaire, they also lay bare how much the rocket company aspires to be a world-dominating AI company. Anthropic is paying $15 billion a year to access SpaceX's cloud computing infrastructure, the S-1 shows. One widely shared, and questioned, slide shows that SpaceX thinks the total addressable market for its space business is paltry $370 billion, while the prospects for its AI business are $26.5 trillion — $6 trillion more than the GDP of China.
Amid these world-historic numbers going up and hubbub over the biggest IPO season in the history of money, Meta began to free up room for more investments in AI by laying off 8,000 employees. They joined thousands more recently laid off employees from Amazon, Atlassian, Block, Cloudflare, Coinbase, Intuit, LinkedIn, Oracle, Workday, and elsewhere who had been flung into a meat grinder of a job market.
Wednesday's Anthropic-OpenAI-Meta-SpaceX tsunami also comes immediately after waves of AI news this past week: a stadium full of undergraduates jeering former Google CEO Eric Schmidt every time he brought up AI; Google ruining the internet with its new AI search feature; and Citadel CEO Ken Griffin, who in January dismissed AI as "all garbage," admitting onstage that he felt "fairly depressed" after witnessing AI agents being able to perform "extraordinarily high skilled jobs" at his hedge fund. "You could see this is going to have such a dramatic impact on society," he said.
All of Wednesday's news broke by the time the sun had risen over Silicon Valley, all of it confirming — if there were any doubters left — that the sun had set on the old world, and we had been launched into another uncertain future for an unknown duration.
Zak Jason is the executive editor of Business Insider's Discourse team.
JetBlue CEO Joanna Geraghty said able-bodied people are requesting wheelchairs to skip the line.
IMF
JetBlue's CEO recently said that able-bodied travelers are requesting wheelchairs to skip lines.
Her comments drew attention to the long-running "miracle flight" phenomenon.
Advocates say policing the "hack", which drew attention on TikTok, could backfire.
Some travelers have found a shameless travel "hack" to skip airport lines: request a wheelchair to board the plane, then walk off at the destination.
This phenomenon of so-called "miracle flights" — where able-bodied travelers ask for a wheelchair to cut security and boarding lines — blurs the line between legitimate disability accommodations and abusing the system.
Earlier this month, during an interview with the Boston public radio station WBUR's "Breakfast Club," JetBlue CEO Joanna Geraghty said US law requires airlines to provide wheelchair assistance to passengers who request it at the airport. Airlines generally cannot ask questions beyond logistics or clarity about the assistance request.
However, she said there is a "group of folks that use wheelchairs to get to the front of the line, and not for legitimate reasons."
The CEO's comments drew attention to the long-running "miracle flight" tension in air travel that others in aviation say has become all too common in the US and lacks an easy solution.
"We have certain flights that have 23 to 25 customers with wheelchairs, and, frankly, nobody wants to try to address some of those challenges because it's a very tough situation to navigate, both politically, but also just heart," Geraghty said.
Not all disabilities are visible, and passengers do not need to use a wheelchair full time to request assistance at the airport. But doing so to bypass airport lines shortchanges people with real mobility issues.
So how do airlines and airport staff police the increasing demands for disability accommodations without unfairly scrutinizing passengers with legitimate — and often invisible — disabilities?
Michele Erwin, the founder and president of the advocacy nonprofit All Wheels Up, told Business Insider that there are few solutions.
She said she's seen firsthand how airlines discuss the abuse behind the scenes and are doing their best to tackle it within the law, but there is virtually no way to verify who does or does not have a disability without asking for legally protected information.
She added that each wheelchair push is an expense for the airlines, so they lose money every time someone abuses the system: "It's not great for either side; we're all living in a gray area."
Airlines handle thousands of wheelchairs a day across their networks, and adding fake requests can worsen service.
Bloomberg/Getty Images
Industry leaders have called out the misuse for years. Former Frontier Airlines CEO Barry Biffle said in 2024 that the ultra-low-cost airline was seeing a "massive, rampant abuse" of special services. He said it costs $30 to $35 per wheelchair request.
The ex-CEO of London's Heathrow Airport similarly said in 2022 that some travelers were using wheelchair assistance to "fast-track" through airports after seeing it recommended on TikTok.
Several reports say Southwest's former open-seating system — where boarding order was determined by check-in time — may have incentivized some passengers to request wheelchair assistance in order to secure a better seat.
However, Erwin warned that efforts to police abuse could actually risk creating new problems for passengers who rely on wheelchairs, especially for reasons not related to mobility.
For example, she said some people who board with a wheelchair but then walk off the plane may be mobile but need help navigating a big, unfamiliar airport. Or they may be someone who has been flying for 24 hours across time zones and is simply exhausted.
So, she said, referring to these individuals as having experienced a medical miracle in-flight ignores the broader context.
Retired Delta captain Mark Stephens told Business Insider that he's aware wheelchair abuse happens, but similarly warned people should not start questioning anyone in the airport using one, on the off chance that they might be lying.
"Many people are disabled with things we cannot see," he said.
Geraghty acknowledged the shortfalls during the interview, saying, "In general, I don't think the airline industry does a great job with our customers with disabilities."
Transportation Department data shows that there were about 43,500 disability-related complaints among all US airlines in 2024.
More than half of the complaints were about failure to provide wheelchair service,such as insufficient staff or leaving someone behind. This may be partly due to the increase in wheelchair abuse, which takes workers away from those who truly need assistance.
Airports like Detroit have deployed autonomous wheelchairs to transport passengers to their gates without an attendant. Erwin encourages people to use it.
: Jim West/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
But Erwin said part of the problem also stems from travelers not notifying the airline in advance that they will need wheelchair assistance.
She said airports can sometimes be overwhelmed by unexpected last-minute wheelchair requests, leaving staff stretched too thin and resulting in slower or worse service. "That's where All Wheels Up comes in," Erwin said. "To educate the community."
Passengers can typically request a wheelchair during the booking process or add it later.The airlines are responsible for providing disability access services, but the assistants who perform these duties on their behalf are usually employed by third-party contractors.
Geraghty similarly said that more opportunities to pre-plan would be helpful: "If we could isolate out the folks who truly needed help, I think we could do a far, far, far better job with it."
