AI industry entering consolidation phase — licensing replaces litigation¶
Insight: December 2025 marked a consolidation inflection point: Disney invested $1B in OpenAI while sending Google cease-and-desist letters (licensing partners get access, unauthorized trainers get sued); Google invested in Cursor at $29.3B while launching a Cursor competitor; Anthropic acquired Ticketmaster's JavaScript runtime (powering Claude Code's $1B+/year revenue); Runway (100 people) beat Google and OpenAI to become top-ranked video AI; Swedish "vibe coding" company (Lovable) tripled to $6.6B.
Detail: The year that began with lawsuits ended with licensing deals and strategic acquisitions. For designers, this means the "sides" have already blended — fighting AI was never the point; negotiating terms was. The consolidation signals AI tools becoming permanent infrastructure rather than experimental additions.