Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty Images Earlier this year, the prevailing tone emanating from the AI industry was one of patronizing triumphalism. Anxiety about a bubble had been hushed by the rapid adoption of AI coding tools in the tech world. The industry was excited about IPOs again. AI executives returned to the oracular mode that had gone out of fashion during the industry’s brief flirtation with retrenchment at the end of 2025. “As we move toward superintelligence, incremental policy updates won’t be enough,” began an OpenAI publication called “Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age.” (Anthropic went with “Policy on the...