Mr. Anagnost goes on to say our view at Autodesk hasn’t changed: AI is a tool to enhance the productivity, creativity, and profitability of the people that design and make the world, but it should also be sensibly regulated because of its potential to do real harm. We’ve said that from the beginning, we mean it, and our opinion hasn’t changed. We also operate on those principles without anyone telling us to. Transparency, safety, and building trust are key to what we do everyday.”
Lofty principles to have, but you know as well as I do, when money is on the line, that line gets a tad bit blurry. Sounds like Google when all those algorithms came out. Remember Panda, Penguin, and Hummingbird? They were introduced to “enhance the user’s experience,” so, sayeth Google. You’d probably crash ChatGPT if you asked it to catalog and date the thousands of times they used it in their legal documents, but I digress. If I were an English teacher and graded Anagnost’s statement, he would have received a D+ for structure. G-d help us if he used AI.
Here’s a little high cholesterol facts you need to know.
#3 Two forces guarantee this slowdown never happens. Wall Street and Beijing.
This is the “eggs” conversation all over again. They’re bad for you. No wait, they’re good for you. Actually, they’re bad again. Now AI’s too dangerous. Until next quarter’s earnings call, when it’ll be the greatest thing since electricity.
Investors didn’t pour billions into frontier AI to watch these companies pump the brakes. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta burned through $130.6 billion on AI in Q1 of 2026 alone. Those four plus Oracle are on pace to spend $800 billion this year, double the $400 billion they spent in 2025. Nobody writing checks like that is interested in a timeout.
And Washington isn’t going to cede the race to China any more than JFK (President Kennedy) would’ve handed the moon to the Soviets. This is the 1960s space race with a profit motive bolted on.
Let’s be clear-eyed about the geopolitics. China’s pouring roughly $125 billion into AI this year, with $56 billion of that coming directly from the government. Beijing treats AI as a state priority, not a quarterly earnings play. They’re also actively backing Iran and have zero interest in being a US ally, now or ever. Decades of regime conditioning don’t reverse because of a trade deal or a handshake at Davos.
So the US private sector is outspending China’s entire AI effort by about 6 to 1, and we’re supposed to believe these companies are going to voluntarily slow down against an adversary spending with that kind of strategic intent? When your chief adversary is arming your enemies and sprinting toward the same technology, “let’s pause and be responsible” isn’t strategy. It’s surrender.
When safety and quarterly earnings collide, we already know which one blinks. And when national security enters the equation, it’s not even a conversation.
Pump the brakes. Not gonna happen.