Silicon Valley leaders highlight concrete returns as AI anxiety grows

If a key focus at last year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, was the need for massive private and public investments to support artificial intelligence development, this year’s event was more about proving the payoff.

Packed into the crowded AI House, one of the conference’s endless corporate spaces, Rasmus Rothe, from the house’s co-host Merantix, declared 2026 the “year of AI ROI.” Slogans plastered across the Davos promenade guaranteed companies like Cisco and IBM had found the formula for returns on AI investment.

OpenAI executives, meanwhile, debuted new education, health and cybersecurity initiatives, framing the moves as part of a push to ensure all markets — not just the U.S. — see gains from the technology.

At a press huddle, Brad Lightcap, the company’s chief operating officer, quoted the sci-fi author William Gibson: “The future is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed.” Lightcap added: “That very much rings true on this.”

The rhetoric hints at the anxiety of this moment for AI. Many investors are getting antsy to see significant commercial growth that justifies the sector’s enormous expenditures and lofty valuations. OpenAI, an unprofitable startup, has committed to spend more than $1.4 trillion on data centers and chips for AI in the coming years, including striking several deals with cloud providers and chipmakers that have been criticized as circular. (At Davos, OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar said she wants to “completely refute” that label.)

But among attendees at Davos, there was also plenty of optimism, with AI leaders highlighting their business traction. Anthropic Chief Executive Officer Dario Amodei, for example, touted the benefits of his company’s focus on enterprise customers.

“It’s a business that’s more stable than consumer,” he said in an interview with Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait. “We can just very directly create value.”

Anthropic earned the most buzz at the conference, thanks to Claude Cowork, a new tool that’s gone viral in tech circles for being intuitive and tackling a wider range of work tasks on the user’s behalf. Though it’s still a “research preview” and limited to certain paid users, the Cowork product offers a glimpse of how advances in AI could translate into greater productivity for a broad mix of professionals.

Top AI developers, including Anthropic and OpenAI, have been working to prove the value of their services for industries that include healthcare and financial services. Some of the clearest, early traction has come in software engineering, where AI tools are speeding up the process of writing and debugging code.

OpenAI said at Davos that sales from its software business, where developers pay to plug into its application programming interface, added about $1 billion “in the past few weeks,” growing 19% on a weekly basis. Anthropic previously said Claude Code reached a $1-billion revenue run rate in just six months.“It’s not vibe coding anymore,” said Tariq Shaukat, CEO of Sonar, a startup that evaluates code quality for companies. “It’s real production.” Shaukat previously ran sales at Google Cloud, where he recalled spending a year to close deals with big financial firms. Now, he said, banks are using AI products released only months ago. He estimates that nearly a third of the code at banks will be AI generated this year.

Timothy Young, CEO of Jasper, another AI startup networking at the Swiss village, cited a proverb from his old company, VMware, to explain how coding tools will lead to broader industry sales: “Value follows what developers do.

”The value can’t come fast enough for AI. In addition to general uneasiness with the pace of AI spending, U.S. and European tech companies are also confronting an uncertain geopolitical landscape that could complicate their global strategies.

Looming over every conversation, even those about enterprise AI, was Donald Trump’s arrival at Davos and his tense standoff with Europe over Greenland. Privately, those who flew in from Silicon Valley worried that Europe might counterpunch Trump’s tariff threats by dropping U.S. tech.

“I have nothing other than sympathy for my former colleagues who are navigating a very complicated day,” George Osborne, the former British politician now running OpenAI for Countries, said the morning before Trump’s speech.

There was also a debate among tech executives over the extent of the threat posed by China. Google’s AI honcho Demis Hassabis told Bloomberg’s Emily Chang that there was a “massive overreaction” to Chinese upstart DeepSeek a year ago, and said the country’s tech firms remain about six months behind the frontier AI of the leading western labs.

In a separate conversation, Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch described that line of thinking as a “fairy tale.” China, he said, “is not behind the West.”

Shaukat said open-source models from China are “everywhere.” Young from Jasper AI, which serves the marketing industry, said a growing number of clients are requesting Chinese models because they’re cheaper. And Christian Klein, CEO of software firm SAP, said he’s seeing increased interest for integration with Alibaba’s AI models across Asia and even within Europe.

“Some companies are saying, ‘You know, you’re going to get hit by tariffs. OK, let’s look into certain alternatives,’” Klein said.

If that continues, it may force other tech firms to rethink their pricing for AI models, making it that much harder to recoup their investments.

Bergen writes for Bloomberg.