Who's holding AI companies to account?
It used to be the tech media. Now they’re cogs in the hype machine.
In early October, Andreessen Horowitz, one of Silicon Valley’s most powerful venture capital firms (that backed Stripe, Airbnb, Facebook), released its AI Application Spending Report. It produced the report in partnership with Mercury, a banking provider to US start-ups (and one of Andreessen Horowitz’s portfolio companies).
For the report, the two companies mined transaction data from over 200,000 US-based tech startups to produce a list of the 50 AI-native apps that startups are spending the most money on. OpenAI and Anthropic topped the list, followed by Replit (that’s significant - you’ll see why later), and other coding assistants, meeting-support tools, and creative platforms like Canva, Midjourney, Freepik, and ElevenLabs.
The report opens with a paragraph that is pure opinion, not backed by any data:
"AI is changing what skills people have, what tasks people do, and what teams look like. That change is hitting big companies differently from small companies. While big companies are getting incremental benefits to existing team structures, at startups we’re seeing truly AI-native companies emerge, built around the next generation of software."But the tech media dutifully toed the Andreessen Horowitz line:
“The report also shows a lot of spending on ‘human augmentors’ or ‘copilots’ that can help boost productivity among the workforce, suggesting startups aren’t ready to fully shift into agentic workflows,” claimed TechCrunch. Erroneously. The report didn’t show a lot of spending. It simply ranked spending by application from more to less.
“The Andreessen Horowitz venture capital firm (aka A16z) crunched startup spending data and found young firms stuffing AI into everything, while bigger businesses remain far more restrained,” parroted The Register in Startups binge on AI while big firms sip cautiously, study shows. Also wrong. There was no study and it didn’t analyse the spending of big firms, let alone compare them to startups.
“Startups are betting big on vibe coding, and their bank statements show it,” gushed Business Insider. Even though that’s not what the report says. And they don’t appear to have any additional information, because “a16z did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.”
You’d be forgiven for drawing these conclusions…
If you’d skimmed the headlines or read the media coverage, you’d be forgiven for thinking:
Companies are spending a huge amount on AI, especially on Anthropic, OpenAI, and Replit.
Nimble startups are outmanoeuvring big enterprises with their brilliant AI adoption.
AI adoption is growing fast.
You’d better get on the AI adoption bandwagon.
Even though that’s not what the data says…
What the data does tell us is this: primarily US-based tech startups - the kind of companies with maybe a 10% chance of survival and a natural interest in vibe coding because they’re building tech products - are spending some money on AI tools.
They’re spending more with OpenAI than with Anthropic, and more with Anthropic than Replit and so on. But we have no idea how much money that is. It could be a hundred dollars, or it could be a billion.
And that five of the companies on that list are Andreessen Horowitz portfolio companies, which means the firm has a vested interest in building hype and urgency around AI adoption generally, and adoption of the tools on the list in particular, especially since two of those five companies (Otter and Replit) have recently faced serious issues that are probably affecting their sales*.
That’s a totally different story. Why do I have to be the one to tell it?
I worked in PR for 20 years and I used to firmly believe that the media’s purpose is to inform the public by scrutinising power. That means
Gathering facts, verifying them, and presenting them truthfully.
Providing context so information can be understood.
Questioning claims made by those with influence.
Holding governments, corporations, and institutions accountable.
Enabling citizens to make informed decisions rather than act on propaganda or hype.
In short, the media’s duty is to interrogate, not amplify. But that doesn’t appear to be what’s happened here.
Reader, do I get a ❤️ for this? This report isn’t about startups embracing AI. It’s about investors manufacturing momentum - turning a small, self-serving dataset into a global narrative that drives more adoption, more urgency, and more capital straight back to themselves. And the media just rolled over.
So no, AI isn’t taking over the world. Not yet. The humans telling the stories about AI still are. And many of them have a financial stake in keeping the story loud.
Every month, the headlines shout, the tech giants posture, and the rules shift under our feet. Most people can’t keep up. If you’re not most people, then sign up for my monthly AI Insider Briefing - 30 minutes to make you the AI expert in the room. October’s briefing was today and I recorded this one - you can watch it here.
*in fairness to the Register, they did reference the Replit scandal.