AI labs wage a reputational knife fight at Davos

January 23, 2026 Alex Heath

Demis Hassabis, chief executive officer of DeepMind Technologies Ltd., during a panel session at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland. | Image: Bloomberg via Getty Images

This is an excerpt of Sources by Alex Heath, a newsletter about AI and the tech industry, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week.

The leaders of the three preeminent frontier AI labs spent this week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, taking shots at each other like candidates in a presidential primary.

I helped start the news cycle. During an interview on Tuesday, I asked Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis about OpenAI's decision to test ads in ChatGPT. "It's interesting they've gone for that so early," he said. "Maybe they feel they need to make more revenue."

The next day, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei piled …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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