
AI Washing: The Corporate Scramble to Rebrand Ordinary Tech as Artificial Intelligence
Companies are misleadingly rebranding ordinary technology as AI to exploit market hype, causing a backlash of cynicism from PR experts and journalists.
The debate around whether AI investment and valuations constitute a financial bubble, including concerns about unsustainable CapEx, parallels to the dot-com era, and the gap between hype-driven spending and actual returns.

Companies are misleadingly rebranding ordinary technology as AI to exploit market hype, causing a backlash of cynicism from PR experts and journalists.
An editorial project documenting the disappearance of 100 AI tools through shutdowns, acquisitions, and domain lapses, primarily occurring in 2026.

Technology stock valuations have fully retraced their AI-boom gains, returning to a forward P/E of 20x.

Investors are abandoning OpenAI for Anthropic on secondary markets, driven by a preference for Anthropic's enterprise-led growth and better risk-reward profile.

The AI investment bubble is reaching a breaking point where unsustainable costs and competitive outspending will likely trigger a systemic financial crash.

OpenAI is pivoting from experimental innovation to a disciplined enterprise strategy to win a high-stakes IPO race against Anthropic and SpaceX.

AI is the latest in a long line of overhyped technologies that will eventually become a mundane part of our digital toolkit.