AI’s Three-Body Problem: no single force can dictate the outcome

The AI economy of 2026 is viewed as a volatile 'three-body problem' involving closed-source frontier labs, open-weight models (including Chinese advancements), and application companies built on top of them. Competition among key players like Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, and xAI is intense, leading to growing scrutiny over the return on investment from AI spending. Despite current market anxieties about high pricing, the article predicts that discomfort with frontier pricing will ease in the second half of 2026 due to increased competition and visible returns.