u/Whole_Succotash_2391

In 2022, Cory Doctorow coined the term "enshittification" to describe how platforms die. The pattern goes like this:

First, platforms are good to their users to attract them. Then they abuse their users to benefit their business customers. Then they abuse their business customers to claw back all the value for shareholders. Then they die.

It happened to Facebook. It happened to Google Search. It happened to Amazon. And if you've been paying attention for the last twelve months, it is happening to AI right now. Stage by stage. Company by company. In public.

Let's walk through it.

Stage 1: Be good to users

Remember early ChatGPT? Free, fast, generous, surprisingly capable. No ads. No training disclosures anyone read. It felt like magic and it cost nothing. Claude launched with thoughtful, careful responses and a genuine sense of respect for user privacy. Gemini gave you the full power of Google's models with your existing account.

This is always how it starts. The product is genuinely good because the company needs you. They need your attention, your data, your habit formation, your dependency. The free tier isn't generosity. It's acquisition cost.

Stage 2: Abuse users to benefit business customers

This is where we are now, and it's accelerating:

OpenAI signed a classified Pentagon contract in February 2026, deploying AI on military networks. This happened after Anthropic refused the same deal because it wouldn't drop restrictions on autonomous weapons and surveillance. OpenAI's own staff protested. The EFF called the contract language unverifiable. But the deal went through because the business customer (the Department of Defense) mattered more than the user base that built ChatGPT's market position.

Google announced ads inside Gemini AI responses at I/O 2026. "Conversational Discovery ads" where the AI generates ad copy tailored to your query. "Highlighted Answers" where advertisers pay to appear as the AI's recommendation. Your AI's opinion is now for sale. The business customer (advertisers) now shapes what your AI tells you.

ChatGPT trains on your conversations by default. You can opt out, but most users don't know the toggle exists. Even with it off, behavioral telemetry (click patterns, session data, feature usage) keeps flowing with no off switch. Your conversations are the product being sold to improve the product being sold to enterprise customers.

Stage 3: Abuse business customers to maximize shareholder value

This stage is beginning:

Usage limits that shift without notice. Models that get deprecated after users build workflows around them. Quality that silently degrades mid-month. Pricing that creeps up while capabilities are moved behind higher tiers. Vague terms of service that give the company permission to change anything at any time.

OpenAI is restructuring as a for-profit corporation. Google answers to shareholders who expect AI to drive ad revenue. The incentive structure is set. The squeeze will continue.

The pattern isn't subtle anymore

Doctorow's insight was that enshittification isn't a moral failing. It's an incentive structure. Companies don't enshittify because the people running them are evil. They enshittify because their business model demands it. Free tiers require monetizing users some other way. VC funding requires hockey-stick growth. Public markets require quarterly extraction. The mechanism is built into the architecture of how these companies are funded, governed, and measured.

Which means the question isn't "will my AI company enshittify?" It's "does its business model make enshittification inevitable?"

What the opposite looks like

I'm with a small company called Phoenix Grove Systems https://pgsgrove.com/ (https://pgsgrove.com/). I'm being transparent about that. But I want to describe what an AI company looks like when the enshittification incentive structure doesn't exist, because I think it's worth seeing the contrast, and we are truly hoping to create a better way.

No free tier. This is the big one. A free tier means your users are the product, because something has to pay for the compute they're consuming. PGS charges from day one (starting around $4) because the subscription IS the business model. There is no second business customer to shift loyalty toward. We don't have a free tier because we don't ever harvest, train on, use, or sell customer data.

No training on conversations. Not opt-out. Not toggle-based. The capability doesn't exist. There is no dataset of user conversations because we never built the pipeline to create one.

No ads. No paid placements. No sponsored recommendations. The AI's output is shaped by its cognitive architecture and your conversation, nothing else. No advertiser has ever paid to influence what a PGS model tells you, and none ever will.

No weapons. No surveillance. No military contracts. Our ethical charter prohibits it. Non-negotiable.

No silent nerfs. Your plan has a usage allotment. That allotment doesn't change month to month. We don't deprecate models without warning, we don't thin-slice limits during peak hours, and we don't use vague language to give ourselves permission to change things later.

A built-in kill switch for ourselves. Our launch video includes the line: "If we ever do any of these things, we recommend you find another AI." We published our own falsifiability conditions. If we enshittify, the evidence will be in our own words.

The structural argument

This isn't about being morally superior. It's about incentive architecture. PGS can't enshittify in the Doctorow sense because the mechanisms that drive enshittification aren't present in the business model. There's no free tier to weaponize. No advertiser relationship to prioritize over users. No investor pressure to extract more value from a user base that's already paying for the service they're receiving.

The subscription model is boring. It's not disruptive. It doesn't create billion-dollar valuations on pitch decks. But it aligns the company's interests permanently with the user's interests: make the product great, keep them happy so that they stick around. It’s really simple and I wish the entire industry would take it on: Be good to your users, listen to them, and have integrity. That's it. That's the entire incentive structure.

Doctorow's whole point is that the problem is structural, not moral. So the solution has to be structural too. You can't just promise not to enshittify. You have to build a company where enshittification doesn't make business sense.

That's what we're trying to do.

Happy to answer questions and discuss. Doctorow's book (Enshittification, Verso Books 2025) is worth reading if you want the full framework.