04On the record
Named companies · sourced figures
The case files are the overheated end — companies that went all in. This is the other end of the same scale: companies whose core business AI is quietly eating because they didn’t think far enough ahead. Not reckless automation, but a future that changed while the model stayed the same. The bill here arrives as a repricing, not a fine.
3 on file · Q2 ’26
−99%
market value since the 2021 peak
500k+
subscribers lost to free AI
1,396
staff cut since 2024
A paywalled product commoditized by a free substitute.
Chegg’s paid homework answers were a $14.5B business — until ChatGPT gave students the same thing for free. The stock is down 99%, and the response came a beat too late.
−76%
new questions since ChatGPT
~50%
monthly visits lost, 2022→24
28%
staff cut, 2023 (reported)
A Q&A network hollowed out by a faster answer.
For fifteen years, developers asked Stack Overflow. Then they started asking ChatGPT instead. New questions have fallen more than 75% — and the site trained the models now replacing it.
−99%
market value since the 2020 peak
~30%
of 2023 sales was the Google contract, cut overnight
+16%
ex-Google revenue growth, FY2024
Human data labelling repriced by the stack it trains.
Appen sold human data labelling to train AI. Then the value moved up the stack: Google cut a contract worth about a third of its sales overnight, and market value fell roughly 99%. The surviving business is growing — it is just a far smaller company now.
A company going bankrupt purely because it refused AI is still hard to evidence in 2023–2026 — that failure books later and quietly. These are the leading edge: incumbents disrupted because the response came after the market had already moved.
See the overheated end →