Marc Bowker said the Trump administration has caused more uncertainty than he's ever experienced in his 23 years as a small business owner.
Marc Bowker
A small-business owner said the Supreme Court tariff decision has left more questions than answers.
Marc Bowker, who owns a comic book shop in Ohio, said his store has paid $12,000 in tariff fees.
He said the Trump administration continues to cause a lot of uncertainty for small businesses.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Marc Bowker, owner of Alter Ego Comics, a comic book shop in Lima, Ohio, after the Supreme Court overturned some ofPresident Donald Trump's tariffs. This story has been edited for length a clarity.
My first reaction to the Supreme Court decision was, "This is awesome and long overdue." The second was, "Okay, what's next?"
Then I saw the president say there would now be a new 10% global tariff and that the Supreme Court justices who ruled against him are unpatriotic and unloyal. So it feels like this is going to drag on forever and ever until he gets his way. It's like death by a thousand paper cuts.
I think there are more questions remaining than answers. I appreciate the Supreme Court siding with Americans and American businesses, but it feels like it's going to be a tug-of-war that may go on throughout this entire administration.
This administration has created a level of uncertainty in the small business landscape that I haven't seen in 23 years of owning my store.
In addition to being a small-business owner in America, I'm a consumer in America, so I'm paying more for everything that my family consumes, from food to physical products. It's a one-two punch for us.
I've already paid thousands, and there's still uncertainty
I've kept a spreadsheet of every shipment that had a tariff charge, and as of today, we've paid over $12,000 since Trump started all of this.
We've had to pass on a percentage of that to our customers, and as a result, we've seen a slowdown in orders. Some are taking a wait-and-see mentality, or they just don't want to pay the extra fee.
Comics themselves — a lot of which are printed in Canada — have not been impacted by tariffs. But for me and for other comic book stores, action figures, board games, and comic book supplies, like storage items, are being impacted. Action figures account for about 65% of my shop's revenue, and they are made in China.
A lot of these orders are made far in advance, too. We were being charged tariffs on items ordered in 2023 and 2024. There's stuff I need to order next week that ships in June of 2027. Is the tariff going to be 6%? Is it going to be zero? Is it going to be 100%? I have no idea.
Marc Bowker and his family in front of his store.
Marc Bowker
It's unclear if small businesses will get refunds or what will happen next
As for the tariff costs small businesses have already paid, are we getting that back? Probably not. Are the corporations that paid the bulk of the tariffs going to be reimbursed? Where does that come from? I feel like this is just going to cause more paperwork, more red tape, more headaches. I don't know what the next step is.
If I could wave a magic wand, yes, there would be some reimbursement of the fees that all American businesses have had to pay. If I had to settle for something, it would be that, effective today, there are no more of these Trump tariffs.
It's hard to be excited about the Supreme Court ruling when, within hours, the White House says it's going to push back with more tariffs.
The administration is throwing so much at us every day that we can't make any progress. It's hard to see what the future will look like.
I would hate to see this stretch on the next three years of the administration. It's going to take all this extra time that could be spent running our businesses and serving our customers, just trying to stop the government from getting its hands in our pockets.
It really feels like our elected officials are not listening to us. Historically, the Republican Party has been promoted as the party of business in the United States. If they truly were, they would be listening to constituents who are saying these tariffs are hurting our businesses.
Sam Altman and Dario Amodei's hands did not make contact, and the internet noticed.
Ludovic MARIN / AFP via Getty Images
Sam Altman and Dario Amodei went viral for refusing to join together in a sign of unity.
Once colleagues, the two AI CEOs have helped nurse their companies' rivalry.
Here's how OpenAI and Anthropic finally reached this point.
If you want to know one of the biggest rivalries in AI, just ask for a show of hands.
On Thursday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei provided what is sure to become an iconic image of their feud. The pair went viral for refusing to join hands as the rest of the world's tech leaders gathered for a moment of unity, sparked by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Here's a timeline of how Altman and Amodei went from colleagues to becoming the face of AI's Cold War.
July 2015: Decisions happened over dinner
Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and the New York Times financial columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin speak onstage during "What Will They Think of Next? Talking About Innovation" at the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on October 6, 2015, in San Francisco, California.
Michael Kovac/Getty Images
In July 2015, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Altman, and a group of elite AI researchers all gathered at the swanky Rosewood Hotel in Menlo Park, California.
According to The New York Times, Musk had a falling out with then-Google CEO Larry Page. Weeks later, Musk, Altman, Amodei, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, and others discussed the formation of a new AI lab to ensure Google had a worthy competitor in the AI space. Musk invited Amodei, per tech journalist Alex Kantrowitz.
Their vision became OpenAI, though Amodei initially elected not to join the startup research lab. Roughly a year later, he changed his mind and joined OpenAI as "Team Lead for AI Safety."
September 2018: Amodei rises up
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei
Markus Schreiber/File/AP
Amodei quickly moved up the ranks at OpenAI. In September 2018, the startup named him its research director.
Altman, who cofounded OpenAI while still serving as president of Y Combinator, began to devote more time to the startup.
In March 2019, Altman stepped down as YC's leader. He then became CEO of OpenAI and led the startup's pivot to a capped for-profit structure.
In November 2019, OpenAI released GPT-2, which Amodei played a major role in developing. A month later, OpenAI named Amodei as its Vice President of Research.
June 2020: OpenAI releases GPT-3
In June 2020, OpenAI began to show just how far the technology had come with the release of GPT-3, considered to be the first highly capable Large Language Model (LLM).
Amodei told The New York Times that the model had "this emergent quality." Independent researchers told the publication that GPT-3's capabilities surprised them, even as the model still showed signs of struggle.
To address safety concerns, OpenAI initially controlled access through a private beta.
December 2020: Amodei goes his own way
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei at The World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Fortune via Reuters Connect
The release of GPT-3 solidified OpenAI's standing, but behind the scenes, tensions were rising.
The rifts began when Amodei successfully lobbied to keep Greg Brockman, an OpenAI cofounder, off the team that developed GPT-3, according to Keach Hagey's biography of Altman, "The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future."
Hagey wrote that Amodei's stunning power within OpenAI had started to ruffle feathers. Differences continued to escalate over Amodei's long-held views on safety, Hagey wrote, especially regarding slowing the pace of updates to prevent malicious uses of the AI models.
Amodei told friends that he "felt psychologically abused by Altman," Hagey wrote. Altman, in turn, was telling colleagues that the tension "was making him hate his job."
On December 29, 2020, OpenAI made it official. Amodei was leaving, and a "handful" of other colleagues were leaving.
Amodei has since suggested that his vision became incompatible with OpenAI's direction.
"It is incredibly unproductive to try and argue with someone else's vision," Amodei told podcaster Lex Friedman in 2024, when asked why he left OpenAI.
Early 2021: Anthropic is created
Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images
With seven other former OpenAI employees, Amodei founded Anthropic in early 2021. The group was extremely close and included Daniela Amodei, Dario's sister. Daniela Amodei later said the name was chosen to emphasize their company's focus on humans.
Only one of Anthropic's initial employees hadn't worked at OpenAI, according to AI Business.
Despite starting from scratch, Amodei said that by the Summer of 2022, the company's chatbot, Claude, had finished training. Amodei said he was worried about what the release of a powerful AI could mean. Anthropic held off on a release.
"I suspect it was the right thing to do," Amodei told Time Magazine in 2024. "But it's not totally clear-cut."
Months later, OpenAI released ChatGPT, kicking off the AI race and making Amodei's former employer a household name.
May 2024: Amodei takes a shot … or did he?
As Anthropic began to establish itself in its own right, Amodei began to use his public appearances to take what were widely viewed as implicit shots at OpenAI.
During an appearance at a Bloomberg event, Amodei noted how Anthropic had kept its leadership intact.
"We have 7 cofounders," he said, Gizmodo reported. "Three and a half years later, we're all still at the company."
While never calling out by name, OpenAI was experiencing upheaval at the time. Months earlier, Andrej Karpathy, an OpenAI cofounder, had left the company. And in November 2023, Altman was briefly pushed out of OpenAI, an effort fellow cofounder Ilya Sutskever assisted. (Sutskever later expressed regret over his role. He formally left OpenAI just days after Amodei's jab, though there had been months of speculation surrounding Sutskever's standing.)
December 2025: 'We don't have to do any code reds'
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman
Journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin asked Amodei about OpenAI's decision to declare a "code red" to marshal resources for ChatGPT amid Google's rising strength.
We have a little bit of a privileged position where we can just keep growing and just keep developing our models, and we don't have to do any code reds," Amodei told Sorkin during an appearance at The New York Times' DealBook summit.
Earlier in their conversation, Amodei appeared to take another swipe at Altman when he talked about some players "who are YOLOing" by making too risky bets on future demand based on their current revenue.
"Who is YOLOing?" Sorkin asked.
"I'm not going to answer that," Amodei replied.
February 2025: A snarky Super Bowl ad gets a response
A still from Anthropic's ad is set to air during the Super Bowl. The ad features a scrawny man who wants to get a six-pack quickly, but a helpful trainer gives him more than just the advice he needs.
Anthropic
Anthropic used the biggest stage available to take its most direct shot yet at OpenAI.
Ahead of the Super Bowl, Anthropic revealed it was spending millions on an advertising campaign to denounce AI chatbot ads. While OpenAI was not named directly, it was clear who the intended target was, given that just months earlier, OpenAI had said it would begin testing ads on ChatGPT.
The ads featured real human actors mimicking the voice of product-pushing AI chatbots when asked questions like how to get a six-pack quickly or how to better connect with your mom.
"First, the good part of the Anthropic ads: they are funny, and I laughed," Altman wrote in a lengthy post on X." But I wonder why Anthropic would go for something so clearly dishonest."
Altman wasn't done.
"Anthropic serves an expensive product to rich people," he continued. "We are glad they do that and we are doing that too, but we also feel strongly that we need to bring AI to billions of people who can't pay for subscriptions."
Days later, the companies went head-to-head again. This time, with the release of major updates to their coding-focused model within minutes of each other.
February 2025: I (don't) want to hold your hand
In a moment before the viral photo, Altman holds hands with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi with his back facing toward Amodei
Ludovic Marin/AFP/Getty Images
A who's who of AI and tech elite gathered in India for a major summit on artificial intelligence.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi took the opportunity to orchestrate a classic image of unity: competing CEOs with their hands raised together. (It's something Modi has done before with other world leaders, and politicians have been doing forever.)
Modi almost got his moment. While Altman held the prime minister's hand, the OpenAI CEO didn't grasp Amodei's hand, who was positioned to his other side. Amodei grasped the hand of the other person next to him, but not Altman's.
Discourse about "taste" is growing among techies on X.
AnnaStills/Getty Images
Tech leaders from Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham to OpenAI president Greg Brockman are posting about "taste."
As life becomes automated with AI, they say, having good taste will become more important.
Others on X have memed the discourse, pointing out some of Silicon Valley's bland taste in style.
Good news, connoisseurs — your judgment may be highly prized in the AI age.
A debate about the importance of "taste" has seemed inescapable on X in recent days, prompting bold declarations, a fair share of eye-rolling, and, yes, plenty of memes.
But there might be some truth to the idea.
The most recent wave of taste discourse began when Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham — who coined "founder mode" — posted a prediction on Saturday.
"When anyone can make anything, the big differentiator is what you choose to make," Graham wrote on X.
This wasn't Graham's first time writing about the importance of taste; in his post over the weekend, he linked to an old essay of his from 2002, titled "Taste for Makers," and he also wrote about the topic again in 2021.
Then, OpenAI's president weighed in.
Will good taste get you a job?
OpenAI president Greg Brockman went even stronger, declaring, "Taste is a new core skill."
A variety of leaders across Silicon Valley also came out in support of the benefits of cultivating taste. As engineers grow into managing more agents and making more decisions, having strong judgment skills (or "taste," as they'd call it) could be crucial.
Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht agreed with Graham and linked back to an earlier post he'd written in January that stated, "In 2026, taste is the engineering differentiator."
Engineers across the industry chimed in. "The AI will make anything but it takes human taste to decide if it's worth keeping," one Google software engineer wrote.
"The taste thing works because it's nebulous, unassailable, and it feeds the ego," Poggio cofounder Matt Slotnick wrote on X, weighing in on the discourse.
Graham gave one glimpse, writing that it was about "being honest with yourself" and moving beyond the mindset of "I like what I like."
Not everyone agreed that taste would become a future-proof skill of the future. Linear head of product Nan Yu wrote that "you probably don't have better taste than AI."
"There are plenty of other distinctly human things that we can contribute, but 'having better taste' isn't one of them," he wrote.
"There's a good chance AI will have better ideas than us within a few years," he wrote. "I don't see why "taste" and direction are uniquely human, like many people say. If an AI can train on it, it can learn it."
Taste memes are on the rise
There's another high-profile figure who championed taste (and basically built his career around it): Def Jam cofounder Rick Rubin.
There's an interview making the rounds of Rubin, in which he says he has "no technical ability" when it comes to music. Anderson Cooper asks what he's being paid for. Rubin responds: "The confidence that I have in my taste."
Is that what software engineers will soon look like? Several meme accounts on X seem to think so, commenting photos of Rubin's bearded face on Brockman's post.
It also begs the question: Do engineers even have good taste to begin with? The answer depends on who you ask — and how you define taste.
General Catalyst creative director Reggie James wrote that techies would be "ruffled" when they learn they're not the top of the taste pyramid.
Stripe alum Sam Gerstenzan wrote that taste was "so rare" in Silicon Valley that, if asked to name the five people with the best taste, everyone would name the same people.
its almost like these tech guys understand that they dont have good taste so they are trying to turn it into this quantifiable set of data points instead of this mysterious, ineffable quality derived from going out and engaging with culture!
The irony, of course, is that tech bros aren't known to have the best taste in one specific arena: style.
The same people prizing taste are wearing backpacks to the bar, Very AI growth head Abril Zucchi wrote. Another user shared a "Person in tech that has 'taste' starter pack."
AI demand is boosting unexpected Japanese companies — including a toilet maker and a seasoning giant.
Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images
A toilet maker and seasoning giant are Japan's unlikely winners in the AI boom.
Toto, famous for its bidets, has drawn investor attention because it makes key components for memory chips.
Food giant Ajinimoto produces an insulating material used in advanced semiconductor packaging.
The AI boom isn't just lifting chipmakers and Big Tech. In Japan, it's flushing gains into a toilet manufacturer and a seasoning giant.
As demand for AI chips surges, investors are piling into companies that sit inside the semiconductor supply chain — even if they're better known for bathrooms and soup stock.
Toilet maker Toto, famous for its high-tech bidets and heated seats, has drawn investor attention. The company makes electrostatic chucks, which are critical components used in the production of NAND memory chips.
Memory prices have climbed sharply in recent months, driven by AI-related demand.
Last week, UK-based activist fund Palliser Capital called Toto "the most undervalued and overlooked AI memory beneficiary," according to reports by Bloomberg and the Financial Times.
After news broke on Tuesday that Palliser Capital had taken a stake and was pushing Toto to promote its chip-parts business, the toilet maker's stock jumped more than 5%. Its shares are up more than 54% over the past year.
It's not just Toto. Japanese food giant Ajinomoto, better known for its umami seasonings and soup bases, has become an unlikely AI infrastructure play. The company produces an insulating material used in advanced semiconductor packaging.
Ajinomoto's latest financials point to strength beyond its core food business. For the nine months ended December, the company reported an 8.9% rise in net profit, while operating profit increased 5.6% year-on-year. The gains were partly driven by its "Healthcare and Others" segment which includes electronic materials used in semiconductors, the company said in a February earnings statement.
After Ajinomoto posted its earnings on February 5, the company's stock rose 13%. Its shares are up more than 56% over the past year.
Not all non-tech companies are benefiting equally from the AI boom. Daikin, best known globally for its air conditioners, supplies high-purity chemical materials used in semiconductor manufacturing. It recently trimmed its outlook, citing uncertainty over US tariffs as a drag on demand.
The Japanese air conditioning maker reduced its operating profit forecast by about 5% to 413 billion Japanese yen, or $2.6 billion, for the fiscal year ending in March.
"Operating profit was significantly affected by the decline in semiconductor demand, decreasing by 44.6% year over year to ¥18,102 million," the company said in its financial report in February.
"Net sales of fluoropolymers fell year over year, despite focused Group efforts to capture strong new demand in the data center field, and was due to the stagnation in the construction markets of the United States and China and the significant overall impact of delays in the recovery of semiconductor demand," it added.
The company said it plans to cushion the blow through price increases and cost reductions.
Daikin's stock dropped as much as 8.4% in Tokyo following its financial results.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and AWS CEO Matt Garman
AP and Getty Images
Wall Street has cooled a bit after a massive sell-off wiped more than $1 trillion in Big Tech valuations.
Recent AI advancements have undermined some investors' faith in established software names.
Jensen Huang, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and Figma CEO Dylan Field have all weighed in.
Big Tech is continuing to bounce back after a brutal sell-off.
Wall Street's fears of AI-related disruption drove a sell-off of software stocks after the release of Anthropic's new industry-specific plug-in.
Not everyone in finance and tech is sold on the idea that AI is going to kill the software business.
From Nvidia's CEO dismissing the concerns, to Zoho's founder acknowledging the industry is "ripe for consolidation," here's what leaders in tech and finance are saying:
Jensen Huang
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang
Steve Marcus/REUTERS
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said software is a tool for AI to use, rather than replace.
"There's this notion that the tool industry is in decline and will be replaced by AI," Huang said during a recent Cisco AI event. "You could tell because there's a whole bunch of software companies whose stock prices are under a lot of pressure because somehow AI is going to replace them. It is the most illogical thing in the world and time will prove itself."
Huang named ServiceNow, SAP, Cadence, and Synopsis, as bright spots in the industry.
Sam Altman
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman
Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said volatility will remain in the software market.
"It's different, it's definitely not dead," Altman said during an interview on TBPN. "How you create it, how you're going to use it, how much you're going to have written for you each time you need it, versus how much you'll want sort of a consistent UX —yeah, that's all going to change."
In the meantime, sell-offs like the one Wall Street has continued now are likely to continue.
"I think it's just going to be volatile for a while as people figure out what this looks like."
Dylan Field
Dylan Field
Dylan Field, Kimberly White/Getty Images for TechCrunch
Figma CEO Dylan Field said it's not just about building something quickly, it's about "building the right thing."
"Good enough, it works, it's not enough," he told CNBC in February. "You really have to focus."
Overall, Field said volatility is good for companies. Shares of Figma have dropped by over 79% over the past year, illustrating the growing pains for the design company since its highly touted IPO in July 2025.
"I think if you look back on this time, we'll just be a more resilient company overall," Field said.
Figma also announced a partnership with Anthropic on a tool that converts AI-generated code into editable designs.
Sridhar Vembu
Sridhar Vembu, founder of Zoho, a cloud-based software company, said SaaS was "ripe for consolidation" long before the rise of AI.
"An industry that spends vastly more on sales and marketing than on engineering and product development was always vulnerable," he wrote on X. "The venture capital bubble and then the stock market bubble funded a fundamentally flawed, unsustainable model for too long. AI is the pin that is popping this inflated balloon."
Vembu said he asks his employees to consider the possibility of the company's death.
"When we accept that possibility, we become more fearless and that is when we can calmly chart our course."
Steven Sinofsky
Steven Sinofsky
Reuters
Steven Sinofsky, who helped lead the development of Windows 7 and 8, said AI may change "what we built and who builds it," but tales of software's demise are just "nonsense."
"Wall Street is filled with investors of all types. There's also a community, and they tend to run in herds. The past couple of weeks have definitely seen the herd collectively conclude that somehow software is dead. That the idea of a software pure play will just vanish into some language model," Sinofsky wrote in a lengthy post on X. "Nonsense."
Sinofsky said it is true some companies will fail. He also noted that such cycles have happened in retail and media.
"Strap in," he wrote. "This is the most exciting time for business and technology, ever."
Rene Haas
Arm CEO Rene Haas
Reuters
Arm CEO Rene Haas isn't panicking.
"As I look at enterprise AI deployment, we aren't anywhere close to where it can be," Haas told the Financial Times.
Haas, who leads the SoftBank-owned semiconductor company, said the current market reaction is "micro-hysteria."
Stephen Parker
JPMorgan analyst Stephen Parker said investors shouldn't be too worried by the sell-off.
"We're seeing a rotation," Parker told CNBC. "It's about a broadening of the recovery story. Cyclicals are picking up the slack, and it's not just the AI infrastructure plays and the hyperscalers that are driving markets higher."
Parker, the co-head of global investment strategy at JPMorgan Private Bank, said AI developments are likely to continue to cause disruption in the software industry.
Anish Acharya
Anish Acharya
Harry Murphy/Sportsfile for Collision via Getty Images
Anish Acharya, a general partner at A16z, said the sell-off was an overreaction based on a misunderstanding of how AI will be deployed.
"You have this innovation bazooka with these models," Acharya told podcaster Harry Stebbings during an episode of "20VC." "Why would you point it at rebuilding payroll or ERP or CRM, right? You're going to take it and use it to extend your core advantage as a business, or you're going to take it to optimize the other 90% that you're not spending on software today."
Acharya said there "will be secular losers," but overall, the sell-off was misguided.
"I think the general story that we're going to vibe code everything is flat wrong and the whole market is oversold software," he said.
Spenser Skates
Amplitude
Amplitude CEO Spenser Skates said the sell-off correctly identified that many SaaS companies are moving too slowly.
"The median SaaS company their innovation has actually slowed to a standstill," Skates told TBPN in February. "I don't know if you guys have ever been inside of these, but it's crazy how little they ship in terms of net new products."
Skates said AI has placed a major emphasis on the speed of innovation.
"It's like sushi," he said. "Buyers are always going to want the best thing. So, if you're keeping up with innovating the best thing, you will be able to charge a premium. It's fine that the 7-Eleven at the gas station now sells sushi. It's not going to put Jiro in Japan out of business."
Matt Garman
AWS CEO Matt Garman
Noah Berger/Getty Images for Amazon Web Services
AWS CEO Matt Garman said the current fears are "overblown."
"AI is absolutely a disruptive force that's going to change how software is consumed and how it's built," he told CNBC in February.
The top Amazon exec said current SaaS companies can still survive this moment.
"They have to innovate, just like the rest of the world," he said. "They can't stand still. If they stand still, they're absolutely going to be disrupted."
Sam Altman and Dario Amodei's hands did not make contact, and the internet noticed.
Ludovic MARIN / AFP via Getty Images
Sam Altman and Dario Amodei's awkward moment at the India AI Summit went viral.
The two AI leaders — and former colleagues — raised their arms but did not hold hands.
Tech leaders, including Sundar Pichai, gathered onstage with Narendra Modi in New Delhi.
The world's biggest AI leaders gathered in New Delhi this week, prepared to talk about the latest models and their impact on societies. They seemed less prepared for a 14-person hand-hold that tech circles will remember for a long time.
On Thursday, top executives, including Demis Hassabis, Sundar Pichai, Brad Smith, Sam Altman, and Dario Amodei, lined up on stage with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the India AI Impact Summit.
In his signature style, Modi held hands with Pichai on his right and Altman on his left and began raising their linked arms for a celebratory photo. Modi has previously taken photos this way with world leaders, including former US President Joe Biden and EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
The other tech execs were quick to catch on to Modi's directive, looking right and left before grabbing their neighbour's hand.
The photo op's most meme-worthy scene was the OpenAI and Anthropic CEOs not managing — or refusing— to hold each other's hands. After a pause, they raised their arms without making contact.
The moment was widely screenshotted and shared on social media.
The awkward moment followed a Super Bowl advertising jab between the two AI giants earlier this month. Anthropic's 30-second commercial roasted OpenAI over its decision to bring ads to ChatGPT.
After Anthropic released a series of Super Bowl ad teasers, Altman responded with a lengthy post on X, calling the Anthropic ad "dishonest."
Amodei cofounded Anthropic in 2021 after leaving OpenAI, citing disagreements over AI safety priorities and the lab's leadership style.
Speaking at an AI summit in New Delhi, Demis Hassabis was asked whether current AGI systems can match human intelligence. AGI is a hypothetical form of machine intelligence that can reason like people and solve problems using methods it was not trained in.
Hassabis' short answer: "I don't think we are there yet."
He listed three areas where current AGI systems are falling short. The first was what he called "continual learning," saying that the systems are frozen based on the training they received before implementation.
"What you'd like is for those systems to continually learn online from experience, to learn from the context they're in, maybe personalize to the situation and the tasks that you have for them," he said during the discussion.
Secondly, Hassabis said current systems struggle with long-term thinking.
"They can plan over the short term, but over the longer term, the way that we can plan over years, they don't really have that capability at the moment," he said.
And lastly, he said that the systems lack consistency. They're adept in some areas and unskilled in others.
"So, for example, today's systems can get gold medals in the international Math Olympiad, really hard problems, but sometimes can still make mistakes on elementary maths if you pose the question in a certain way," he said. "A true general intelligence system shouldn't have that kind of jaggedness."
Humans, in comparison, would not make mistakes on an easy math problem if they were math experts, he added.
Hassabis said in a "60 Minutes" interview last year that true AGI would arrive in five to 10 years.
The executive cofounded DeepMind, an AI research lab, in 2010. The lab was acquired by Google in 2014 and is the brains behind Google's Gemini. In 2024, Hassabis won a joint Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work on protein structure prediction.
AGI is a disputed topic in Silicon Valley. Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi said at a September conference that current AI chatbots already meet the definition of AGI, but Silicon Valley leaders keep "moving the goalposts" and pushing toward superintelligence, or AI that can outthink humans.
The AI Summit in India, from Monday to Friday this week, has attracted big names from the tech and AI spheres. Notable speakers on the summit's agenda include OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Meta's chief AI officer, Alexandr Wang.
Flight 1583 departed Stockholm Arlanda Airport on February 7 and was supposed to land in Málaga, Spain, four hours later.
However, almost two hours into the journey, the Airbus A320neo U-turned while flying over Belgium, according to flight-tracking data.
It flew back to Sweden, touching down in the capital 3 hours and 20 minutes after taking off.
In a statement to Business Insider, an airline spokesperson said the plane turned around "after a suspected rodent sighting on board."
"We followed established procedures and, as a precaution, returned the aircraft to Arlanda to carry out standard inspections of both the aircraft and relevant suppliers," they added. "Passengers were boarded on a new aircraft to Malaga shortly after."
SAS did not confirm exactly what kind of rodent was spotted, but Flightradar24 reported that it was a mouse.
Diverting a plane due to a rodent might seem bizarre, but loose animals on board can pose a safety risk. It could potentially damage electrical wiring or other components, leading to system faults or, in rare cases, a fire.
Data from Flightradar24 shows an extra flight, operated under the call sign SAS95T, flew from Stockholm to Málaga later the same day.
It arrived around 3:30 p.m., five hours later than passengers were first scheduled to arrive in the Costa del Sol.
This wasn't the first time that such an unwelcome passenger has caused a flight to turn around.
In 2024, One Mile at a Time reported that an SAS flight to Malága returned to Copenhagen after a mouse was found in somebody's in-flight meal, before it escaped into the cabin.
Later that year, a TAP Air Portugal plane was grounded after 132 hamsters escaped from their cages inside the cargo hold.
Corporate resignations rarely make news, except at the highest levels. But in the last two years, a spate of X posts, Substack open letters, and public statements from prominent artificial intelligence researchers have created a new literary form — the AI resignation letter — with each addition becoming an event to be mined for meaning. Together, the canon of these letters — some of them apparently bound by non-disclosure agreements and other loyalties, legally compelled or not — tells us a lot about how some of the top people in AI see themselves and the trajectory of their industry. Overall, the image is bleak.
This past week brought several additions to the annals of "Why I quit this incredibly valuable company working on bleeding-edge tech" letters, including from researchers at xAI and an op-ed in The New York Times from a departing OpenAI researcher. Perhaps the most unusual was by Mrinank Sharma, who was put in charge of Anthropic's Safeguards Research Team a year ago, and who announced his departure from what is often considered the more safety-minded of the leading AI startups. He posted a 778-word letter on X that was at times romantic and brooding — he quoted the poets Rainer Maria Rilke and Mary Oliver. Opining on AI safety, his own experiences working on AI sycophancy and "AI-assisted bioterrorism," and the "poly-crisis" consuming our society, the letter had three footnotes and some ominous, if vague, warnings.
"We appear to be approaching a threshold where our wisdom must grow in equal measure to our capacity to affect the world, lest we face the consequences," Sharma wrote. "Throughout my time here, I've repeatedly seen how hard it is to truly let our values govern our actions."
Sharma noted that his final project at Anthropic was "on understanding how Al assistants could make us less human or distort our humanity" — a nod, perhaps, to the scourge of AI psychosis and other novel harms emerging from people overvaluing their relationships with chatbots. He said that he didn't know what he was going to do next, but expressed a desire to pursue "a poetry degree and devote myself to the practice of courageous speech." The researcher ended by including the full text of "The Way It Is" by the poet William Stafford.
In the annals of AI resignations, Sharma's missive might be less dramatic than the boardroom coup that ousted OpenAI CEO Sam Altman for five days in November 2023. It's less troubling than some of the other end-of-days warnings published by AI safety researchers who quit their posts believing that their employers weren't doing enough to mitigate the potential harms of artificial general intelligence, or AGI, a smarter-than-human intelligence that AI companies are racing to build. (Some AI experts question whether AGI is even achievable or what it might mean.)
But Sharma's note captures the deep attachments that top AI researchers — who are extremely well-compensated and work together in small teams — feel to their work, their colleagues, and, often, their employers. It also exposes some of the tensions that we see cropping up again and again in these resignation announcements. At top AI labs, there's an intense competition for resources between research/safety teams and people working on consumer-facing AI products. (Few, if any, public resignations seem to come from people on the product side.) There are pressures to ship without proper testing, established safeguards, or knowing what might happen when a system goes rogue. And there's a deep sense of mission and purpose that can sometimes be upended by feelings of betrayal.
Many of the people who have publicly quit AI companies work in safety and "alignment," the field tasked with making sure that AI capabilities align with human needs and welfare. Many of them seem very optimistic about AI, and even AGI, but they worry that financial pressures are eating away at safeguards. Few seem to be giving up on the field entirely — except perhaps Sharma, the aspiring poet. Either they jump ship for another seven-, eight-, or nine-figure job at a competing AI startup, or they become civic-minded AI analysts and researchers at one of a growing number of AI think tanks.
Sam Altman
Shelby Tauber/Reuters
All of them seem to be worried that either epic gains or epic disasters lie ahead. Announcing his departure from Anthropic to become OpenAI's Head of Preparedness earlier this month, Dylan Scandinaro wrote on LinkedIn, "AI is advancing rapidly. The potential benefits are great — and so are the risks of extreme and even irrecoverable harm." Daniel Kokotajlo, who resigned from OpenAI, said that OpenAI's systems "could be the best thing that has ever happened to humanity, but it could also be the worst if we don't proceed with care."
Recently, xAI, where co-founder Elon Musk is notorious for tinkering with the proverbial dials of the Grok chatbot, has seen a half-dozen members of its founding team leave. But the locus of the AI resignation letter, as a kind of industry artifact, is the red-hot startup OpenAI, where major figures, including top executives and safety-minded researchers, have been leaving for the last two years. Some resigned; some were fired; some were described in the press as "forced out" over internal company disputes. Seven left in a short period in the first half of 2024.
With revenue paling compared to its massive and growing infrastructure costs, OpenAI recently announced that it would begin incorporating ads into ChatGPT. That caused researcher Zoë Hitzig to quit. This week, she published a resignation letter in the Times, warning about the potential implications of ads becoming part of the substrate of chatbot conversations. "ChatGPT users have generated an archive of human candor that has no precedent, in part because people believed they were talking to something that had no ulterior agenda," she wrote. But, she warned, OpenAI seemed prepared to leverage that "archive of human candor" — much as Facebook had done — to target ads and undermine user autonomy. In the service of maximizing engagement, consumers might be manipulated — the classic sin of the modern internet.
If you think you are building a world-changing invention, you need to be able to trust your leadership. That's been a problem at OpenAI. On November 17, 2023, Altman was dramatically fired by the company's board because, it claimed, Altman was "not consistently candid in his communications with the board." Less than a week later, he performed his own boardroom coup and was reinstated, before consolidating his power. The exodus proceeded from there.
On May 14, 2024, OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever announced his resignation. Sutskever was replaced as head of OpenAI's superalignment team by John Schulman, another company co-founder. A few months later, Schulman left OpenAI for Anthropic. Six months later, he announced his move to Thinking Machines Lab, an AI startup founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, who had replaced Altman as OpenAI's interim CEO during his brief firing.
The day after Sutskever left OpenAI, Jan Leike, who also helped head OpenAI's alignment work, announced on X that he had resigned. "OpenAI is shouldering an enormous responsibility on behalf of all of humanity," Leike wrote, but the company's "safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products." He thought that "OpenAI must become a safety-first AGI company." Less than two weeks later, Leike was hired by Anthropic. OpenAI and Antrhopic did not respond to requests for comment.
At OpenAI, departing researchers have said that the experts concerned with alignment and safety have often been sidelined, pushed out, or scattered among other teams, leaving researchers with the sense that AI companies are sprinting to build an invention they won't be able to control. "In short, neither OpenAI nor any other frontier lab is ready, and the world is also not ready" for AGI, wrote Miles Brundage when he resigned from OpenAI's AGI readiness team in 2024. Yet he added that "working at OpenAI is one of the most impactful things that most people could hope to do" and did not directly criticize the company. Brundage now runs AVERI, an AI research institute.
Across the AI industry, the story is much the same. In public pronouncements, top researchers gently chastise or occasionally denounce their employers for pursuing a potentially apocalyptic invention while also emphasizing the necessity of doing that research. Sometimes they offer a "cryptic warning" that leaves AI watchers scratching their heads. A few do seem genuinely alarmed at what's happening. When OpenAI safety researcher Steven Adler left the company in January 2025, he wrote that he was "pretty terrified by the pace of AI development" and wondered if it would wipe out humanity.
Yet in the many AI resignation letters, there's little discussion of how AI is being used right now. Data center construction, resource consumption, mass surveillance, ICE deportations, weapons development, automation, labor disruption, the proliferation of slop, a crisis in education — these are the areas where many people see AI affecting their lives, sometimes for the worse, and the industry's pious resignees don't have much to say about it all. Their warnings about some disaster just beyond the horizon become fodder for the tech press — and de facto cover letters for their next industry job — while failing to reach the broader public.
"Tragedies happen; people get hurt or die; and you suffer and get old," wrote William Stafford in the poem that Mrinank Sharma shared. It's a terrible thing, especially the tones of passivity and inevitability — resignation, you might call it. It can feel as if no single act of protest is enough, or, as Stafford writes in the next line: "Nothing you do can stop time's unfolding."
Jacob Silvermanis a contributing writer for Business Insider. He is the author, most recently, of "Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley."
Alyson Isaacs joined Meta with about $200 in savings after running a startup.
She shared how she prepared to return to entrepreneurship while working in Big Tech.
Isaacs resigned from Meta last year — and shared advice for others weighing a career change.
When Alyson Isaacs joined Meta in 2022, she only had about $200 in her savings account. A six-figure salary offered a chance to rebuild her finances, but her ultimate goal lay outside Big Tech.
After college, Isaacs "completely drained" her savings on a startup she'd co-founded, and found herself grappling with her next career move. After weighing her options, she decided to follow the advice of a mentor: go to "startup rehab" — in other words, take a full-time job.
"You can always get a job at a Big Tech company,'" said Isaacs, who's 28 and lives in San Francisco.
About four months later, she landed a product manager role at Meta in the company's Quest for Business virtual reality division. But her entrepreneurial itch never left, and she eventually began mapping out the best path back into the startup world.
"There are ways you can be entrepreneurial," she said of working at Big Tech, "but it's very much not the same."
Over the past year, I've interviewed more than a dozen workers who, like Isaacs, chose to quit their jobs at major employers — in some cases without another role lined up. While some eventually landed at another large company, others stepped away from the corporate world entirely — joining a smaller business, launching their own venture, pursuing a career pivot, or focusing on personal priorities like parenting.
They've become outliers in an economy where workers are quitting at one of the lowest rates in the past decade — a trend driven by a hiring slowdown that's left some clinging to their jobs with few appealing alternatives. Those who have called it quits told me they did so for a mix of reasons: concerns about job security, shifts in workplace culture, entrepreneurial ambitions, or a desire for more meaningful work. In short, they wanted greater long-term agency over their careers.
Isaacs shared how she decided to take the leap back into entrepreneurship — and offered advice for others facing a similar career crossroads.
Preparing for a return to entrepreneurship
After leaving her post-college startup, Isaacs took a month to reset. She then spent two months interviewing at smaller companies to fine-tune her résumé and sharpen her interview skills. Eventually, she applied for a role at Meta and landed the job. She moved from the Berkeley area to San Francisco and started in May 2022 — about a year after graduation.
While Isaacs didn't have firm plans to return to entrepreneurship, she knew that if she ever went down that path again, she'd need to be financially prepared for life without a steady paycheck. So she started living well below her means, including living in a less expensive area, going to a basic gym, cooking at home, and avoiding shopping sprees.
"I saved so hard because I knew that this wasn't going to be the end game for me, and I wanted to start my own thing again eventually," she said.
Isaacs also prepared for a potential return to entrepreneurship by spending about five hours a week angel investing, which involved scouting and backing startups. After about a year of saving, she began making a few investments, each under $10,000. She said the experience helped her build a network in San Francisco's startup scene and spot gaps other entrepreneurs could exploit — insights that helped shape her own business ideas.
The final phase of Isaacs' preparation was soaking up everything she could from her time at Meta, including transitioning to a product manager position at Instagram — one of Meta's subsidiaries — in 2024. She said the roles gave her knowledge and experience that entrepreneurship alone couldn't provide.
"Traditional entrepreneurship was just flying by the edge of my seat and seeing what worked," she said. "But I needed that level of expertise to go farther in my career."
The question was when to make the leap and leave Meta. Isaacs said the death of her father in 2024 weighed heavily on her thought process.
"That really triggered this thought in my brain of, 'Is being a product manager at a Big Tech company what I want to do for the rest of my life?'" she said. "And the answer was resoundingly no — I wanted to do something on my own and prove myself."
By mid-2025, Isaacs found herself thinking more and more about a startup idea in the consumer AI space — and struggling to focus on her job at Meta. On July 1, she resigned; the next day, she began working full-time on her startup, which she described as an "agentic AI solution for personal wellness." The company is currently in stealth, meaning the team isn't publicly sharing full details while the product is still in development. She said she and her two co-founders are testing the product with users and plan to open a pre-seed funding round in the spring.
Advice for others weighing big career moves
Isaacs said she knows many people might hesitate to give up a Big Tech job. But she believes some underestimate their chances of finding a new role or building something themselves — and end up stuck in jobs they don't enjoy.
"It's kind of like dating," she said, adding that if you anticipate a bad dating pool, "you're going to stay with your bad ex."
Isaacs said she wasn't worried about resigning from Meta, in part because she's a "super optimist" about her career. If her startup doesn't work out, she's confident in her backup plan — the same one she relied on after her post-college startup opportunity fell through.
"Leaving Meta wasn't scary for me because I was like, 'I can always get another job in Big Tech,'" she said.
Isaacs has a few pieces of advice for other aspiring entrepreneurs. She recommends connecting with as many people as possible who are relevant to the venture you want to pursue — and looking for ways to help them, whether through angel investing, advising, or offering support.
"You kind of create this flywheel of people helping you if you help other people first," she said.
Additionally, even if your end goal is to build a business, Isaacs said having experience at a big-name company can give you valuable credibility as an entrepreneur.
"I needed to be undeniable as a founder, and having a big-box name brand on your résumé gives you that undeniability," she said.
AI researcher Gary Marcus said that if someone is not creatively inclined, they may find AI quite fun.
Gary Marcus
Gary Marcus said AI fatigue is not likely to hit everyone the same way.
Marcus said some workers may find AI enjoyable for creative uses.
As for software engineers, Marcus said he gets why programmers are starting to burn out.
AI fatigue won't hit everyone the same way, AI researcher Gary Marcus said.
"In some domains, AI might actually make a person's job more fun," Marcus told Business Insider.
Software engineers are increasingly discussing how AI is draining them. Siddhant Khare, who builds AI tools, recently wrote about how he's experiencing AI fatigue.
"If someone who builds agent infrastructure full-time can burn out on AI, it can happen to anyone," Khare wrote.
Marcus said that not all industries are set to be disrupted in the same way AI has upended programming and engineering.
"If somebody needs to do some artistic work and they don't really have artistic talent, it might be fun to get the system to make them feel like they have a superpower," he said.
However, Marcus said he isn't surprised that programmers are beginning to feel fatigued.
"Some people in coding, in particular, probably feel like constant pressure, and now they feel like what they're doing is debugging somebody else's code, instead of writing code," he said. "Debugging somebody else's code is not particularly fun."
The feeling Marcus described echoed what Khare told Business Insider when asked to expand on his AI fatigue.
"We used to call it an engineer, now it is like a reviewer," Khare said. "Every time it feels like you are a judge at an assembly line and that assembly line is never-ending."
Steve Yegge, a veteran engineer, said companies should limit employees' time spent on AI-assisted work to 3 hours. He said AI has "a vampiric effect."
"I seriously think founders and company leaders and engineering leaders at all levels, all the way down to line managers, have to be aware of this and realize that you might only get three productive hours out of a person who's vibe coding at max speed," Yegge told The "Pragmatic Engineer" newsletter/podcast. "So, do you let them work for three hours a day? The answer is yes, or your company's going to break."
Susan Cannon is struggling to pay off her credit card debt due to the high interest rates.
Desiree Rios for BI
Sitting outside every morning with a fresh cup of coffee or reading a book in the front yard at night: it's the simple pleasures that matter to Susan Cannon.
"I can't get the balance down because I am still having to use credit cards at the end of the month to get groceries and gas," Cannon, who lives in a mobile home in rural Texas, told Business Insider. "I pay my bills, but because of the interest rates, it keeps going up. I feel like I'm being gouged."
Cannon has $39,440 in credit-card debt spread across 19 cards with varying interest rates, from 12.15% to 34.99%. The issue began to spiral when the pandemic hit — she lost her part-time job as a mystery shopper, which she had held since retiring from her full-time job as a medical coder in 2015.
Since then, she has relied on minimal COVID relief funds, her Social Security, and her pension. Credit cards have helped her stay afloat, using them for gas, groceries, and home repairs. While she paid at least $25 more than the minimum monthly payment, the interest rates prevented her from making a dent in her balance.
The only way she believes she can pay off her balance is through lower interest rates. Capping rates is supported by both Democratic and Republican lawmakers, and even President Donald Trump — he recently proposed a 10% cap on credit card interest rates, a proposal pushed by lawmakers like Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Companies and leaders in the financial world have said that capping rates would ultimately have a negative impact on consumers because banks may limit their offerings, driving more people to riskier sources of credit.
Credit card debt in the US is at a record high. Inflation and high living costs are pushing consumers to turn to credit cards to stay afloat in the short term, while high interest rates drag them down in the long term.
Economic conditions play a significant role in high credit-card balances, Adam Rust, the director of financial services at the Consumer Federation of America, told Business Insider.
"Wages aren't growing as quickly as the cost of living. People are struggling to get by," Rust said. "They use their credit card when they're having a tough time making ends meet, and repeated across tens of millions of households, the result is a surge in credit card debt."
Cannon said that Trump's proposal to cap rates would make a huge difference for her. Since her divorce in the 80s, she has worked multiple jobs at once, including working for Coca-Cola during the day while cleaning office buildings at night. She later worked in accounting full-time and, on weekends, handed out samples at grocery stores until her retirement. She now works part-time as a mystery shopper, earning about $400 to $500 a week, and has cut back her hours to preserve her health. Even if she looked for more work, it wouldn't be easy; US employers are hiring at one of the lowest rates since 2013.
Cannon said a cap on credit card interest rates would make a significant difference for her.
Desiree Rios for BI
She's spent her life working to pay her bills, but she couldn't prepare for the pandemic and the financial and emotional toll it would take, and she doesn't see an end in sight unless interest rates go down.
"Am I going to keep working like this, or am I going to be able to sit down and at least just sit outside and read a book in the evening?" Cannon added, saying that she lives minimally, doesn't buy new clothes, has no TV subscriptions, and keeps just a prepaid phone, "but I don't know what more I can do."
'It's all going toward interest'
Cannon started signing up for credit cards about 15 years ago, believing that paying off more cards would boost her credit score. Her strategy worked for a while — she said that she would apply for a credit card, pay off the balance, set it aside, and her score would go up.
While the cards with the highest interest rates were store credit cards that offer discounts on certain purchases, Cannon said she made sure to use them sparingly. She did not anticipate losing a third of her income once the pandemic hit. Credit cards turned from a way to boost her credit score to a means of survival.
"With this cold, my electric bill last month was $200, and I'm expecting to get hit with about a $300 bill, I believe, for next month," Cannon said, adding that maintaining her home and land has added to her debt.
Still, many people use credit cards for reasons beyond making ends meet. For example, travel rewards can motivate people to purchase vacations and other travel expenses on their cards. A 2024 Bankrate survey said that respondents reported high credit card usage for medical costs, too much discretionary spending, and home renovations. A 2025 AARP report found that credit card debt is the most common type of debt among Americans aged 50 and older, with cardholders using them for everyday expenses and housing costs.
"I've always tried to put some in savings, but it's gotten to where it's all going toward interest," Cannon said. "I just cannot get ahead."
She's tried to contact some of her banks to lower her interest rates, to no avail. Cannon most recently received a denial letter in the mail from CitiBank — where she has a 28.49% interest rate — which said its decision "was based, in whole or in part," on information from her credit reporting agency.
"Based on your credit score, your current APR is equal to or lower than the APR we offer consumers with the same credit score who apply for the same or a similar credit card product today," the letter said.
Interest rates on credit cards have steadily climbed over the past decade. The average rate stands at nearly 23% annually, according to the New York Federal Reserve, up from about 12% a decade prior. Rust said that credit card companies, and especially those that manage store cards with the highest interest rates, are "incredible profit machines" that are savvy at pulling consumers in for specific products.
"Those cards benefit from having a consumer who's captive to using that card in that store to get that deal," Rust said. "And so perhaps it's not surprising that interest rates are frequently higher as a result."
The motivation for companies to charge high interest rates could go beyond profit, an analysis from the New York Federal Reserve said. The rates could offset losses when a customer defaults, the analysis said, along with operating expenses, such as marketing costs, that might be built into the interest rate.
"You might say, 'Why don't they just give them a lower rate, and then they won't need the marketing because people will come for the lower rate?' But people don't come for the lower rate. They respond to the marketing," Itamar Drechsler, one of the authors on the analysis, told Business Insider.
For example, consumers might be pulled in by a limited-time low APR or certain rewards or points, without considering that the promotion is temporary and whether they can afford a higher rate down the road.
Cannon has always made sure to pay at least the minimum monthly payment on her credit cards to keep the balance from spiraling.
Desiree Rios for BI
Cannon ensures she makes at least the minimum monthly payment on all her cards so she doesn't fall too far behind. She uses her Social Security check to cover about half of her bills, and at the end of each month, she finds herself transferring some money from her savings account into her checking account to cover the remainder of her expenses — leaving her with just enough to pay slightly more than those minimum credit card payments, but nothing extra.
"I have tried to keep up with these credit cards, and I still am," Cannon said. "I feel like a fool, but at the same time, I wouldn't be in this situation if they hadn't raised those interest rates."
Tackling the credit card problem
Credit card interest rates are a rare issue that has garnered bipartisan agreement. The 2009 CARD Act required companies to notify customers of interest rate increases at least 45 days in advance and placed restrictions on actions such as late fees and withdrawal fees. However, the legislation didn't cap interest rates or rate increases.
That's why there's been a renewed push to cap interest rates. Trump called for a one-year, 10% cap on rates in early January, saying in a Truth Social post that he would "no longer let the American Public be 'ripped off' by Credit Card Companies that are charging Interest Rates of 20 to 30%, and even more."
More recently, over 55 organizations, including the Consumer Federation of America and the NAACP, called on House and Senate lawmakers to pass bipartisan legislation that would cap credit card interest rates at 10% for 5 years. Research from Vanderbilt University found that the proposal could save $100 billion a year.
Credit card companies have pushed back on the proposed caps. A coalition of banking groups said in a joint statement in response to Trump's proposal that a 10% cap "would reduce credit availability and be devastating for millions of American families and small business owners who rely on and value their credit cards, the very consumers this proposal intends to help. If enacted, this cap would only drive consumers toward less regulated, more costly alternatives."
Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan's CEO, said on a recent earnings call that capping credit card rates could limit access to credit for customers with lower credit scores.
Those more costly alternatives include payday loans, which tend to charge high interest rates and fees that can be a lot more difficult for consumers to escape than credit cards, Rust said. SoFi's CEO, Anthony Noto, said his company is prepared to extend personal loans to consumers, should a credit-card cap be implemented.
"Relying on credit cards is expensive, but it's important not to forget that they still come with protections," Rust said. "They still cost less than a payday lender. It's still easier to resolve a problem with your credit card company than with a buy now, pay later company."
Cannon makes up just a sliver of the $1.28 trillion in credit card debt in the US, and she said that she recognizes that other people have it worse than her. It doesn't make her situation less painful. She physically cannot work multiple jobs, and if she put all of her money toward her credit cards, she wouldn't be able to maintain her property and afford her basic needs.
"I never thought I would be in this position," Cannon said. "I'm just surviving."
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You can enjoy many forms of Olympic skiing, but if you're looking for heart-racing downhill speeds, alpine skiing is what you're seeking. It's broken into five variants: downhill, super-G, giant slalom, slalom, and combined. If you're ready to tune in, here's how to watch Olympic alpine skiing for 2026.
The sport's events kicked off on February 7, with men's and women's downhill, men's and women's team combined, and men's and women's super-G, culminating in gold medals for Switzerland, the USA, Austria, and Italy. The technical events, giant slalom and slalom, remain, and it's not too late to catch them broadcast live from the comfort of your home.
Keep reading to find out how to stream Olympic alpine skiing from wherever you are. You can also find a schedule of upcoming events below.
*Local channels, like NBC, are only available in select regions on Sling.
How to watch Olympic alpine skiing in the US
Just like the rest of the Winter Olympics, alpine skiing will be broadcast through NBCUniversal channels in the US. In terms of what streaming service to use, Peacock is your safest bet as the Olympics' livestreaming hub in 2026. It starts at $11 a month and covers every event, both live and on demand, if you're late to the party.
If you're looking for something more like traditional cable, a live TV streaming service is more your speed. Our two recommendations for Winter Olympics coverage are DirecTV and Sling TV — the former of which offers NBC and USA in both its Signature and MySports genre plans. It's pricier, though, starting at $70 a month with around 20 popular sports channels to peruse (plus ESPN Unlimited access). If you're new, consider signing up for DirecTV with $10 off your first two months after a free five-day trial.
Our second recommendation, Sling, also broadcasts NBC and USA in its Sling Blue plan. If you're seriously considering this option, be sure to check your region's channel availability, since local channel coverage (including NBC) can vary. Plans with local channels start at $50 a month, making it a more affordable live TV streaming alternative.
How to watch Olympic alpine skiing in Canada
If you're in Canada, you can catch alpine skiing on CBC — meaning you can watch the sport for free on CBC Gem. You'll need to create an account to start.
How to watch Olympic alpine skiing in the UK
Watching alpine skiing from the UK is a bit different, with the BBC only offering select coverage of the Winter Olympics. If you have a valid TV license, you can catch this programming with a BBC iPlayer account. If you'd rather not miss a thing, a Discovery Plus plan will cost you money but be more comprehensive in its content.
How to watch Olympic alpine skiing in Australia
To watch in Australia, all you'll need is a free 9Now account to stream through Nine. Alternatively, you can find more complete Olympics coverage through Stan Sport, which starts at $32 a month.
How to watch Olympic alpine skiing from anywhere
Caught outside the above countries but still want to catch the action on the slopes? Luckily, a VPN, or virtual private network, can help. By enabling users to change their device's virtual location, you can stream using the options above. Not only will it be beneficial for your alpine ski viewing, but using a VPN is a common and recommended security measure that enhances a user's online privacy without interfering. NordVPN is one of the best options you can choose, with great speeds, cybersecurity features, and even a 30-day money-back guarantee. Learn about it more in our NordVPN review.
Note: The use of VPNs is illegal in certain countries, and using VPNs to access region-locked streaming content might constitute a breach of the terms of use for certain services. Business Insider does not endorse or condone the illegal use of VPNs.
