The most influential voices in AI just gathered at WIRED's Power Summit, and the divisions couldn't be starker. While Google executives painted AI as a renaissance opportunity, media CEOs revealed the brutal reality of plummeting traffic and demanded billions in compensation. The Monday summit exposed fault lines that will shape AI's future across politics, tech, and journalism.
The gloves came off at WIRED's AI Power Summit Monday, where tech's biggest players faced uncomfortable truths about AI's destructive wake across industries. What started as another industry gathering quickly turned into a heated debate over who pays the price for AI's rapid advancement.
Google VP of government affairs Markham C. Erickson kicked off the tension by painting AI as America's next great scientific renaissance. "We have this generational opportunity to reignite American scientific leadership," Erickson told the packed New York audience, pointing to Google's protein modeling breakthroughs and materials science advances as proof of AI's transformative potential.
But media executives weren't buying the optimism. "The insinuation that AI Overview is not getting in the way of the 10 blue links and the traffic going back to creators and publishers is just 100 percent false," fired back Mike Reed, CEO of Gannett | USA Today Network. Reed's blunt assessment cut straight through Google's carefully crafted messaging about maintaining a "healthy ecosystem" while user preferences evolve.
The numbers tell a darker story. Publishers across the board report dramatic traffic declines since Google rolled out AI Overviews, which summarize content directly in search results instead of sending users to original sources. Vox Media's Jim Bankoff and People Inc.'s Neil Vogel echoed Reed's concerns, painting a picture of an industry under siege.
Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch, drawing from his experience leading Pandora through music streaming's upheaval, didn't mince words about what's at stake. "AI is having a dramatic impact on our industry," Lynch said. "We are really talking about billions of dollars to compensate industries like ours for one of the most critical inputs for these models, which is the content."
The media industry's pushback goes beyond complaints. Reed announced that Gannett has launched DeeperDive, its own AI-powered chatbot designed to keep readers within the publisher's ecosystem rather than losing them to external AI tools. It's a defensive move that signals how publishers plan to fight back against AI cannibalization.
Political leaders offered their own competing visions for AI's future. Senator Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut Democrat, warned that policymakers need to act fast to prevent AI from causing the same damage social media inflicted on democratic discourse. "We want to deal with the perfect storm that is engulfing journalism," Blumenthal said during his conversation with WIRED's Katie Drummond.
