Unbundling

A world of autonomous agents and fragmented systems is emerging—and it will upend everything we thought we knew about power and control.

From the halls of Congress to the server farms of Silicon Valley, a fundamental shift is underway. The old giants—the search engines, the social networks, the tech monopolies that once seemed unassailable—are losing their grip. In their place, a new, decentralized ecosystem is rising: AI models that can be fine-tuned and deployed by anyone, voice assistants that manage our schedules, medical chatbots that hold our health data, and open-source frameworks that defy national boundaries. This is the Great Unbundling.

In this incisive and deeply reported book, we trace the seismic forces driving this transformation. We see how a Chinese AI lab sends shockwaves through Wall Street, how a government's 'kill switch' proposal grapples with the reality of AI that transcends borders, and how a startup acquisition of an astrology app signals a new kind of convergence. We travel from the labs of Anthropic and OpenAI to the garages of hacker-researchers, from the halls of the DHS to the roiling debates over open-weight models. This is not a book about technology; it's about power—who holds it, how it's wielded, and what happens when it's diffused.

But unbundling is not merely a story of technological disruption. It is a human story. It plays out in the doctor's office as patients consult AI about their symptoms, in the newsroom as journalists confront a platform that no longer sends them traffic, and in the offices of startups hemorrhaging staff in the name of efficiency. We are witnessing the dismantling of institutions that once provided stability—and the emergence of a landscape where trust is negotiated one interaction at a time. This book is a road map for that landscape, showing how individuals, companies, and governments can adapt.

Drawing on interviews, internal documents, and on-the-ground reporting, Unbundling offers a framework for understanding the forces reshaping our world. It doesn't pretend to have all the answers, but it asks the questions we can no longer afford to ignore: If everything is breaking apart, what will hold us together? And how do we build a future where innovation doesn't outpace our ability to govern it?