| 1 | Sixteen months changed the industry's shape. January 2025: the United States signed Executive Order fourteen one seventy-nine, reversing the federal posture. August 2025: the European AI Act took full effect, the first binding horizontal AI statute on a major economy. September 2025: China's synthetic-content rules became effective. Quarter four 2025: DeepSeek R one shipped, reframing the inference-cost conversation through open-weights reasoning at frontier-adjacent capability. Quarter one 2026: Anthropic overtook OpenAI on LLM revenue. April 2026: the Stanford HAI AI Index 2026 reported the first year SWE-bench Verified was effectively saturated. Three structural shifts — compliance, compute, capability — and none of them unwinds on the present trajectory. |