Yesterday in Cupertino, Apple confirmed what everyone in the industry already suspected. The rebuilt Siri runs on a custom version of Google's Gemini, a deal Bloomberg pegs at roughly $1 billion a year. Think about what that means. The hippest and most vertically integrated company on Earth, the company that designs its own silicon rather than trust anyone else's, looked at the frontier model layer and decided to rent.
That decision landed in the same ten days that Anthropic confidentially filed for an IPO, SpaceX targets a June 12 debut at a valuation reported near $2 trillion, and OpenAI signals it is moving soon. Analysts estimate the three offerings could pull north of $200 billion out of public markets - possibly this is why crypto is crashing right now. The entire US IPO market raised $45 billion in all of 2025.
Hold those two facts next to each other.
Record capital is flooding into the model layer at the precise moment the world's most demanding buyer concludes the model layer is sufficiently interchangeable to lease.
And the buyers are flinching.
Axios reported in late May that corporate America has hit AI sticker shock. Microsoft canceled most of its Claude Code licenses, partly over cost. Uber's COO called AI spending harder to justify. One consultant described a client who burned through half a billion dollars in a single month because nobody set usage caps. Gartner still projects global AI spending will reach $2.53 trillion in 2026. The money is not stopping. The patience is.
So here is the analytical question that matters for you, not your IT department: if the intelligence itself is becoming a commodity input, like cloud compute before it, like electricity before that, where does differentiation live? The market is answering. It lives in context, the proprietary data and workflows only you possess. It lives in distribution; the customer relationships are only yours. And it lives in the one asset nobody puts on a balance sheet: the ability to explain, credibly and consistently, what you are doing with all of it.
Three questions every senior executive and founder should be able to answer before the end of this quarter:
First, can you explain your AI spend as a return rather than a religion? The sticker-shock stories share one feature: leadership bought capability without building the narrative to justify it. When your CFO opens the invoice, when your board asks what the tokens bought, when an analyst asks the question on an earnings call, "we are investing in AI" is no longer an answer. It is an admission you do not have one.
Second, what happens to your AI story when the labs report quarterly? The IPOs change the information environment for everyone. Once OpenAI and Anthropic trade publicly, every model release, every pricing change, every miss gets marked to market in real time, and elite media will be hunting for the corporate customers exposed to it. If your AI strategy is publicly tethered to a vendor whose stock just dropped 30 percent, do you have language ready, or will you be drafting it the morning the reporter calls?
Third, who owns the narrative about what only you can do? Apple's answer was instructive. It rented the model and kept the customer, the device, the data, and the story. Your version of that answer exists. The question is whether it lives in a strategy document somewhere or in the mouth of every executive who speaks for you, in the same words, to Capitol Hill, to investors, to your own skeptical employees.
The world has changed. The way you need to explain it has not. Tariff volatility, supply chain disruption, NATO realignment, China competition, AI governance, export controls, energy transition, interest rate uncertainty: these forces are reshaping how companies are understood, not just how they operate. Most senior executives and founders treat communications as a tactic for explaining decisions after they are made. The senior executives and founders who win in this environment treat communications as a strategy that shapes an audience's understanding before, during, and after a decision is made, not just as an explanation after the fact.
Enjoy the ride + plan accordingly.
-Marc
*****
Marc Ross specializes in Geopolitics + Communications for global business, at the intersection of commerce and governments. Founder of Caracal Global, a communications consultancy serving Fortune 1,000 companies, private equity, and founder-led businesses; and Brigadoon, an intelligence network connecting founders and civic leaders since 2013. DET, WAS, EDI, LON. marc@caracal.global | marc@brigadoon.live | +1 202 596 5270
*****
