Story Brief

Two celestial bodies orbiting each other trace stable, predictable paths. Add a third, and the system turns chaotic: each body is large enough to bend the others’ paths, and a small nudge by one can swing the trajectory of all three. That is how I have come to see the AI economy in 2026 — as three bodies pulling on one another: the closed-source frontier labs, led by OpenAI and Anthropic; open-weight models, mostly out of China; and the application companies built on top of both.

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