AI models are hoovering up corporate knowledge, and that’s leaving one big loser, says Satya Nadella.
In an article posted on X on Sunday, the Microsoft CEO warned of a future in which a handful of AI providers capture most economic value while industries lose ownership of their knowledge.
“The last thing any of us want is a world where every company across every sector is ceding value to a few models that eat everything they see,” Nadella wrote. “There is no societal permission for an AI future that hollows out entire industries.”
Nadella compared the AI era to globalization, warning against repeating that dynamic.
“Think about what happened in the first phase of globalization, where entire industrial economies were hollowed out by outsourcing,” he wrote. “The GDP numbers looked fine on the surface, but the displacement was real and the consequences are still being felt.”
Instead, he advocated for a broad AI ecosystem in which companies keep control of their learning systems, which he said would enable innovation and retain employee expertise.
Nadella’s post echoed concerns other Big Tech CEOs have been raising this year.
In a February podcast, Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy said that the biggest software companies are at risk of being reduced to mere data sources.
“The big model makers want to create a world in which all of the data for all of the enterprises is easily available to them,” Ramaswamy said. “Everything else, the world, is just a dumb data pipe that feeds into that big brain.”
Ramaswamy added that Snowflake needs to operate with a “fear” that people would stop using AI agents developed by software companies and instead want an all-inclusive agent that has data from Snowflake and everywhere else.
In a January LinkedIn post, Box CEO Aaron Levie said that AI models can perform high-level knowledge work across nearly every profession, from law to strategy and scientific research.
“The question that we will have to wrestle with is, in a world where everyone has access to the same expert intelligence, how does a company differentiate?” Levie wrote. He said that context would be the answer.

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Crude oil prices sank on Sunday night after President Trump posted on social media that a deal to end the war with Iran was “complete.”
Oil futures markets promptly dropped 4%, after markets reopened for trading following their typical weekend break. Prices had already fallen significantly on Thursday and Friday in anticipation of a deal, bringing the per-barrel price of crude Sunday night down 12% from where it had been in the middle of last week.
Brent crude, the global benchmark, is now below $84 a barrel, and West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. benchmark, beneath $81. At one point in this conflict, global oil prices had touched $126 a barrel. They remain elevated compared to pre-war prices, which were in the $60s, but are now cheaper than they have been at any point since the very first days of this conflict.
Trump’s initial post on Sunday evening said he was authorizing “the toll free opening of the Strait of Hormuz,” and directed ships to “start your engines.” Before the war, approximately 20% of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas passed through that waterway, and the disruption of traffic has caused the greatest oil supply shock in history.
In a follow-up post, Trump later said that the strait would reopen “upon the signing of the Deal on Friday, for purposes of mine removal.”
Throughout this conflict, oil prices have repeatedly fallen on headlines promising an imminent deal to reopen the strait; however, they’ve never dropped this low. Significantly, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, who has played a central role negotiating between the U.S. and Iran, has confirmed that a deal has been reached.
A rapid reopening of the strait would ease pressure on the world’s oil consumers, particularly in Asia and Europe. However, it would not mean an immediate return to pre-war oil supply levels and prices.
“It could be months before things return to something like the way things were before the war, at least as far as flows out of the Strait of Hormuz go,” says Kevin Book, a managing director at Clearview Energy Partners, an independent research firm. That’s because some oil and natural gas production fields and refineries have been taken offline, or damaged in the conflict. “The facilities that have been shut down, some of them can start fairly quickly. Others may take months.”
Transit takes time, too. Ships also need to move in and out of the strait, and from there around the world.
And over the past few months, the world has tapped into its stockpiles of oil in order to make up for missing supplies; refilling those inventories could keep upward pressure on oil prices for months.
Before the war began, the world had been oversupplied with oil, which was keeping prices low. Book says it’s not clear whether returning to “normal” will mean returning to that status quo.
“It’s not obvious that we’ll be in a surplus any time soon,” he says.

NEW YORK (AP) — High oil and gasoline prices and energy supply problems won’t be solved overnight, despite an agreement to end the Iran war and open the Strait of Hormuz announced Sunday.
It will likely take months before energy companies can resume operations to the point of meeting the world’s demand, according to energy experts. The slow pace of the process of shipping and refining crude oil, and doubts about the security of traveling through the strait mean the effect won’t be seen immediately, they said.
Ships loaded with crude oil have been stranded in the Persian Gulf for more than three months, unable to safely travel through the waterway, through which about a fifth of the world’s oil and gasoline supplies typically traveled before the war began.
“It’s going to take time for people to feel comfortable and for insurance to be in place … particularly to get people on the ground to restart some of these assets,” said Daniel Evans, global head of fuels and refining research at S&P Global Energy.
Still, oil prices slipped early Monday after the deal was announced.
Brent crude, the international standard, was down $3.45 at $83.89 per barrel. U.S. benchmark crude oil lost $4.03 to $80.85 per barrel.
Those prices are still well above the roughly $70 per barrel where oil was trading before the war started.
As the higher prices unwind, ships that have been stranded will have to exit the strait, and then new tankers will have to come in to be loaded, Evans said.
“To bring a ship in, you need to be confident that you’ve got a big enough window of safety to bring it in, load it and move it out,” he added.
Oil tankers also move slowly, he explained. It takes months to travel from the strait to distant countries, deliver the crude oil to a refinery for processing and then arrive at its final destination.
In addition, some producers in the Middle East paused extracting oil from the ground, known as a shut-in, when they ran out of storage space. Restarting those operations can be a slow process.
Countries such as Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates, where there are alternate pipelines or routes besides the Strait of Hormuz to deliver oil, may be among the quickest to resume production, said Alan Gelder, senior vice president of refining, chemicals and oil markets at Wood Mackenzie, an analytics firm.
“But places like Iraq could be much more challenged because they’ve had a much bigger shut-in, their fields are more difficult … it may well take about a year before they get back,” he said.
Investment in the energy system, which can take years to see the results, ground to a halt after the strait’s closure, Gelder said. So it will take time for this capital to restart.
Countries that shut in oil production won’t want to restart until they know there is a stable, durable strait, and that a ceasefire will last more than 30 or 60 days, said Daniel Sternoff, senior fellow at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University.
“We don’t know what open means or what the speed of evacuation of trapped material is going to be,” he said.

For college commencement speakers this year, mentioning how artificial intelligence is changing the job market or the world in general has been a surefire way to get booed. So when Google CEO Sundar Pichai took Stanford University’s graduation stage Sunday morning as the keynote speaker, it was notable he didn’t mention AI at all.
Though the booming technology may seem like a natural fit for graduates of the prestigious university located in the heart of Silicon Valley, Pichai instead spoke about his own life experience. Still, the soft-spoken chief executive didn’t completely escape some backlash.
Around 200 students walked out as Pichai took the stage, and smaller groups in the audience waved banners, blew whistles and waved Palestinian flags before also leaving mid-speech. Pro-Palestinian protesters condemned the company’s ties with the Israeli government, particularly its controversial $1.2 trillion cloud-computing deal with the country in 2021, known as Project Nimbus. The walkouts follow other Stanford commencements over the last three years where students have demonstrated in response to Israel’s war in Gaza and the university’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian demonstrations on campus.
For at least the second year in a row, students walking out on Pichai hosted their own “People’s Commencement.” This year’s event featured activist Mahmoud Khalil as its keynote speaker. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested and detained Khalil for more than 100 days last year, threatening his deportation over his pro-Palestinian activism on Columbia University’s campus in 2024.
After the demonstrations quieted down, Pichai was largely well-received. Stories of his own failures and triumphs from his earlier years, like immigrating to California, dropping his doctorate in favor of a master’s degree, and struggles when he started at Google were greeted with scattered laughter and applause.
One of Pichai’s predecessors, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, wasn’t received as warmly when he spoke at the University of Arizona commencement last month. Graduates booed when Schmidt said that “AI is going to touch everything,” even “if you don’t care about science.”
In a recent New York Times “Hard Fork” appearance, interviewers asked Pichai what his “boo strategy” would be in light of Schmidt’s snafu. But Pichai took themes of technological advancement in a different route, focusing more broadly on accessibility, including an anecdote about rural women in India using smartphones to learn new trades.

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Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) spoke out Monday against accepting illegal orders, reviving a months-old clash with President Donald Trump after she said his social media attacks over a 90-second video led to threats against her and her family.
Slotkin Says Silence Will Not Protect Critics
Slotkin wrote on X that the dispute began with a November 2025 video she organized with five other Democratic lawmakers with military or intelligence backgrounds. The lawmakers urged service members to refuse illegal orders and honor their oath to the Constitution.
Trump threatened to have me hanged over a 90-second video I made. I’m a sitting United States Senator and spent decades serving this country, and it didn’t matter. Keeping your head down will not keep you safe. Staying quiet will not keep you safe. pic.twitter.com/xFWVcOivMy
— Elissa Slotkin (@ElissaSlotkin) June 8, 2026
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“Trump threatened to have me hanged over a 90-second video I made. I’m a sitting United States Senator and spent decades serving this country, and it didn’t matter,” Slotkin wrote. “Keeping your head down will not keep you safe. Staying quiet will not keep you safe.”
The November video, titled “Don’t Give Up the Ship,” featured Slotkin, Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) and Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.), Chris Deluzio (D-Pa.), Maggie Goodlander (D-N.H.) and Chrissy Houlahan (D-Pa.).
Lawmakers Defend Warning On Illegal Orders
The lawmakers spoke directly to active-duty service members, saying troops faced pressure amid the Trump administration’s domestic deployments and reminding them that they must reject illegal orders.
Trump responded on Truth Social by calling the video “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR FROM TRAITORS!!!” He later wrote, “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” and shared a follower’s post saying, “HANG THEM GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD !!”
Slotkin later said the remarks triggered bomb threats, swatting incidents involving her family and graphic messages from people saying they wanted to see her executed for treason. Capitol Police placed her under round-the-clock protection.
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Federal Inquiry Escalates Political Fight
In January, Slotkin said the Trump administration had opened an investigation into her through the office of U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro. The Justice Department has not publicly detailed the inquiry.
Slotkin has defended the video, saying it restated standard military training and protected speech. Critics of the lawmakers say Trump’s posts referred to legal penalties for sedition or treason, not a direct order to harm them.
“This moment isn’t really about me,” Slotkin said in a May 31 social media post. “When the administration is willing to go after a senator this way, it sends a message to every American who might speak up. That should concern people in both parties.”
Separately, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth moved to censure and retroactively demote Kelly. Kelly sued, alleging unconstitutional retaliation for protected speech.
Image via Shutterstock/ Joey Sussman
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