If it feels like the AI frenzy has hit a fever pitch lately, that’s because it has.
But while 2025 was a year of excessive AI investment and hype, 2026 could be the year we find out which companies emerge victorious—and which will be left in the dust in both the public and private sectors.
Winners are starting to emerge. Over the past year, Anthropic appears to have surged past OpenAI as the LLM-maker of choice for Big Business, even as it faces headwinds from the Trump administration and the Pentagon. It’s attracting so many enterprise clients and first-time AI spenders that OpenAI is reportedly shifting some of its focus away from consumers to start reclaiming ground.
In the private markets, AI threatens to make the lifespans of startups shorter than ever. Traditionally, venture capitalists have had to wait seven to 10 years to see investments pan out. Today, that feels closer to seven months or even seven weeks. Even the most promising companies can be threatened by the ripple effects of a minor Anthropic or Gemini product update.
On that front, Fortune’s Allie Garfinkle brings us a riveting case study: Cursor, an AI coding company whose valuation soared from $2.5 billion to almost $30 billion last year. Along the way, Cursor was one of the fastest startups in history to reach $1 billion in annualized revenue. That figure has since doubled to $2 billion, with help from the biggest American companies: Cursor estimates that 67% of the Fortune 500 are using its tools.
Yet the company and its 25-year-old CEO and cofounder, Michael Truell, now face an existential crisis, trying to prove what they’re building is a durable business rather than a nice-to-have feature that Anthropic or OpenAI can easily replicate.
Truell spoke with Allie for the story and acknowledged the scramble to adapt to new demands. VCs and Cursor customers did too.
“I’ve been building some form of software for 27 years now,” Aaron Levie, Box CEO and Cursor customer, told Allie. “The sheer rate of change is unlike anything we’ve ever seen.” Read her story here.
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