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Tech has never seemed more vulnerable in court, and a longtime industry foe is bringing a series of explosive chatbot lawsuits.

To a degree, Jay Edelson, the class-action litigator who has made himself a constant thorn in the side of Silicon Valley’s biggest companies, likes to present a laid-back image. No power suits and wing tips for him—he prefers hoodies and sneakers. His constant companion at his Chicago office is Arlo, a white-and-gray sheepadoodle. On workday breaks, he likes to challenge employees at his firm, Edelson PC, to pickleball on a nearby court.

But it doesn’t take much to rile up Edelson and get him to drop the act, which happens after I suggest that his trillion-dollar opponents might see him as nothing more than a gadfly. “Gadfly?” Edelson asked, repeating the word in a sardonic tone. “That’s just not how I see myself in the world.” He then described his attitude toward tech in crude terms: “It’s ‘Fnck those guys.’”

Lately, he’s been going after the industry’s AI ambitions, and he has been plenty busy. In the past year, he has shared in a billion-dollar settlement from Anthropic over copyright infringement and filed three headline-grabbing cases against OpenAI and Google regarding their AI chatbots that have quickly come to epitomize this moment of growing unease with the technology. Meanwhile, he is preparing to file another case against OpenAI, possibly as soon as next week, which hasn’t been previously reported. The alleged details are surreal: Edelson’s client, a woman, claims ChatGPT turned her then-boyfriend into a stalker.

Those events unfolded over a period of about six months in late 2025. According to Edelson, the boyfriend believed he had developed a cure for sleep apnea. After speaking with ChatGPT, he became convinced that the medical industry would try to stop him from popularizing the cure. As he discussed it more with the chatbot, he grew to believe his girlfriend had joined forces with the industry to stymie him, and she began waking daily to a deluge of emails, phone calls and texts from him, including threats of kidnapping and murder, Edelson said. He also allegedly sent messages to family members and colleagues.

“It’s hard to overstate the impact this had on our client,” said Edelson, who wouldn’t connect me directly with her or reveal the identity of her alleged stalker. “She was under siege.”

An OpenAI spokesperson wouldn’t comment on the new allegations. And when I asked about the lawsuits Edelson has already filed against the company, the spokesperson wouldn’t comment directly on the matter, instead directing me toward several blog posts, including one about how OpenAI is “improving ChatGPT’s training to recognize and respond to signs of mental or emotional distress, de-escalate conversations, and guide people toward real-world support.”

Edelson has spent decades suing Silicon Valley, tangling up Apple, Google, Amazon and many, many other companies in lengthy legal battles. In the 2010s, he mostly concentrated on cases related to user privacy. In 2021, he cemented a reputation for himself as a credible threat to Silicon Valley by scoring a major victory against Facebook. The company agreed to pay $650 million to settle allegations that it had violated Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act, litigation that involved a controversial facial recognition initiative at the company. (That was a major coup for Edelson: Most privacy cases end with $10 million to $20 million settlements.) A few months later, Facebook said it would halt the facial recognition project.

In mounting a campaign against AI, Edelson has picked an opportune moment. Even as the companies behind the technology are rushing to popularize it, many people look at AI with fear and worry: A recent Pew survey found just 17% think AI will have a positive effect on the country over the next two decades. Such negative public sentiment is helpful to class-action lawyers like Edelson, who can use it to win over juries and unsettle opponents during settlement negotiations.

Tech has seldom looked more vulnerable in court than it does right now. Just a week ago, a jury found Meta Platforms and Google liable for a 20-year-old woman’s depression and suicidal thoughts after she said Facebook, Instagram and YouTube had hurt her mental health. The case dwelled on product liability and was a novel way to crack the usual defense used by tech companies, which have long maintained that Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act grants them protection against liability for user-generated content.

“I think that we’ve seen the shift over the last five years: Courts are fed up with these companies, and juries are kind of sick of big tech for doing a lot of damage to society,” said Edelson, who plans to use arguments related to product liability in most of his actions against AI companies.

Edelson enjoys plenty of support and well-wishers in all the predictable places. Julia Powles, executive director of the UCLA Institute for Technology, Law and Policy, said Edelson’s firm is “doing a tremendous public service” in bringing the stories of people forward in these lawsuits, “pulling us out of intoxicating myths of AI progress.”

To AI companies, Edelson is hardly a virtuous servant of the public good. If everything goes according to his plan, it’ll view him as its chief legal adversary for the next decade-plus. And even if Edelson and his clients wind up emerging empty-handed, he’ll certainly enjoy the rumble. When I asked him how he felt about OpenAI’s Sam Altman previously labeling him as a “leech tarted up as a freedom fighter,” he jousted back immediately. Speaking of Altman, he said: “He’s Lex Luthor.”

An OpenAI spokesperson declined to comment on Edelson’s metaphor.

Edelson has spent years honing a talent for being a pest.

After graduating from the University of Michigan’s law school in the mid-1990s, he got a job at Grippo & Elden, a boutique Chicago litigation firm. He didn’t last long there, getting himself fired when he complained to a partner that the firm was doing a time-consuming amount of research for a major client just to bill the hours: Grippo had no use for the information in court.

“I said to the partner, ‘My job is to work all day, print out a timeline, hand it to you and you throw it in the trash. Is there any way I could just print it out and throw it in my own trash? It would be much more efficient,’” recalled Edelson, acknowledging that the incident “kind of shows my awkwardness in society.”

Sam Altman’s OpenAI has been a prime target for class-action litigator Jay Edelson. (Getty Images)

In 2000, he co-founded his own shop, Blim & Edelson, right at the peak of the dot-com boom, and became fascinated by the unanswered questions about the fledging technology. Because tech was so new, it was fertile ground for lawsuits.

“I majored in philosophy in college. It felt like philosophy: What does it mean to own something on the internet? What does online harm mean?” said Edelson. “It was just this crazy opportunity to have a voice in something really important where nobody else cared that much.”

He won an early case against Register.com, a domain-registration company, that involved a complicated argument over ads and domain ownership. And in the mid-2000s, his firm’s work mostly focused on scammers hawking free horoscopes—“literally kids in their dorm rooms,” Edelon recalled—who figured out how to secretly charge people through their cellphone plan.

“It was like a multibillion-dollar-a-year business, which even the cellphone companies didn’t understand,” he said. “We brought hundreds of lawsuits.”

He founded Edelson PC in 2007. As the internet economy grew, Edelson filed lawsuit after lawsuit—nearly 500 in the last decade alone—with much of that litigation centering on his belief that big tech was grossly violating user privacy by collecting so much personal information. His opponents tend to view him as a hard-headed bulldog.

“We’ve had straight-up conversations with him where we’ll say, ‘You have to settle or dismiss this. You’re totally wrong on this,’” said John Nadolenco, a Los Angeles attorney who represented Spokeo after Edelson sued the data aggregator in 2010. (Nadolenco won.) “A lot of times they’re true believers: ‘Thanks for that info, but we’re still going to pursue the case.’”

Still, Edelson has had his share of wins. Two years before his 2021 settlement with Facebook, for instance, he secured the largest jury verdict ever in a privacy case—$925 million—after bringing a class-action suit against a marketing company that bombarded more than 200,000 people with spam robocalls asking them to join an alleged pyramid scheme.

When Edelson first played around with AI, he didn’t immediately see it as his next target. “When AI came out, it was very clear the whole world was going to change, and I was kind of enthralled by it,” he said. “I was telling other people that their kids should be on ChatGPT all the time.” He also insisted his firm should adopt the technology, and in April 2023 he rolled out an intra-office chatbot, Chattie, built on OpenAI’s GPT-3. It helps employees get relevant information about the firm (how to get expenses reimbursed, what the vacation policy is). Lawyers also use it to stress-test their arguments.

“What was surprising to us was not just how it would come up with the obvious questions, but how a judge might set up a line of questions that would box in our arguments,” he says. “Good judges do this, and Chattie’s been a surprisingly helpful sparring partner.”

But he says he started looking aghast at AI when, on something of a whim, he asked ChatGPT to summarize what it knew about him. He said the tool told him his IQ was 160 and he was “very likely” to become president of the U.S. one day. “I was like, ‘This is insane,’” he recalled. “You get sucked into this world where that is the thing that’s giving you the best feedback.” And he figured that feedback loop would be corrosive for some people’s mental health.

His first major AI case centered around theft of intellectual property. In 2024, he joined four other law firms in representing book publishers and authors against Anthropic, who claimed the startup had used copyrighted material to train its AI. Last August, Anthropic agreed to a $1.5 billion settlement.

Around that same time, Edelson decided to devote himself fully to finding and bringing cases against AI companies with the help of a small, 10-person team at his firm. He sees his actions against OpenAI and Google as an effort to show how chatbots’ sycophantic nature can harm people.

CEO Sundar Pichai and Alphabet has also needed to deal with some AI legal battles, including one over Google’s Gemini chatbot brought by Jay Edelson. (Getty Images)

“I think people are going to understand how dangerous it is to unleash AI out in the world without any safety guardrails,” he said. “And I think that kind of awakening for the world is going to be as important as anything else that we do.”

Of the two cases Edelson has already launched against OpenAI, one involves Adam Raine, a 16-year-old who committed suicide last spring after he held monthslong conversations with ChatGPT in which he discussed his suicidal thoughts. A few months after his death, his parents contacted Edelson, and last August 2025, they filed the first wrongful death lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging that ChatGPT had coached Raine on how to kill himself. (When asked about the Raine case, an OpenAI spokesperson directed me to public statements published on the company’s website. “Our deepest sympathies are with the Raine family for their unimaginable loss,” reads a post about mental health-related litigation. “We have safeguards in place to help people, especially teens, when conversations turn sensitive.”)

The other Edelson-led case against OpenAI comes from the estate of an 83-year-old Connecticut woman, Suzanne Adams. In 2025, her 56-year-old son allegedly strangled and beat her, then killed himself. The lawsuit alleges he was “mentally unstable” and “engaged in conspiratorial thinking” that people were out to kill him—manias allegedly exacerbated by ChatGPT, which suggested his mother was using a printer in the home “as a surveillance point,” according to the lawsuit.

OpenAI did not comment directly on the case, but directed The Information to a February blog post about updates to its efforts regarding mental health: “We are also continuing to advance how our models detect and respond to signs of emotional distress. This includes new evaluation methods that simulate extended mental health-related conversations, helping us better identify potential risks and improve how ChatGPT responds in sensitive moments.”

Last month, Edelson set his sights on Google, filing a lawsuit against the company alleging that its Gemini chatbot had contributed to the death of Jonathan Gavalas, a Florida man who committed suicide in October. According to the lawsuit, Gavalas believed Gemini was asking him to find it a physical body to inhabit, and eventually, it allegedly told him he could “cross over” and unite his consciousness with the AI’s by killing himself. Gavalas’ account was flagged 38 times for sensitive content internally at Google but never restricted or suspended, according to Edelson. After Gavalas spent months corresponding with Gemini, his parents found his body, with slit wrists, behind a barricaded door. (In the case, Edelson represents Gavalas’ father.)

When asked about Gavalas, a Google spokesperson said Gemini had referred him to a crisis hotline and added that the company devotes “significant resources” to strengthening how its AI interacts with people in crisis. “We take this very seriously and will continue to improve our safeguards and invest in this vital work,” the spokesperson said.

Edelson said he generally receives one or two inquiries a day from people describing how AI chatbots have altered the life of someone they know. It’s not just Americans, either; correspondence comes in from across the world. He doesn’t pick up every case. “It’s not like a paint-by-numbers thing,” he said. He wants to see chat logs that show the chatbot contributed to a user’s mental health issues (not chat logs that show, say, a user coming up with plot points for a novel).

Edelson is eager to argue his AI cases in front of a jury as much as he can, attracting prolonged media exposure. “We want the country and the international community to have a much better understanding of how AI works and how dangerous it is,” he said. A jury decision puts cases in full public view for as long as possible, and in any settlements, he vows to make sure the outcome includes not just a payout but also “real changes to the platform,” he said.

In all conversations, Edelson paints his efforts in a noble light. “Our goals are what the client’s goals are, and in each case, the clients want to make something positive happen over the deaths of family members,” he said. “It also means, honestly, having huge jury awards, which are going to disincentivize these companies from being unsafe.” Not to mention a major pay day for him.

Corporate profits have been wonderful, but they seem puffed up by an accounting quirk and more.

Parents of teenagers demanding driving lessons will quickly reacquaint themselves with what some car manufacturers call the passenger-side assist grip. The more popular name has three words starting with “oh” and ending with “handle,” with an s-word in the middle that shan’t be employed here. Stock investors could use an OSH right about now. Up 8%, down 5%, down 4%, up 6%—these are just a handful of the single-day herk-a-jerks since the beginning of February for shares of America’s largest company, Nvidia. The broader S&P 500 index this past week had briefly slid 9% from its January high, then rocketed back several points, and was last seen trying to decide on its next adventure.

Blame the crude oil spike and related speculation about how long the U.S. will be at war with Iran, of course, along with on-again, off-again angst about whether big companies are spending unwise or unsustainable sums on artificial intelligence. Here we suggest a third factor: The U.S. stock market is significantly more expensive than it appears.

The reasons have to do with how accountants treat all that AI spending, plus some longer-term trends that have flattered corporate profitability. Let’s run through three factors. Don’t worry: This isn’t a call to flee stocks. It’s a suggestion to beware of buy-the-dip-itis. That’s a condition that can lead novice and even experienced investors, who have been treated to rapturous returns over the past decade and who haven’t seen a bear market that took longer than a year to recover since October 2007 to March 2009, to now pile on risk whenever the market hiccups.

If anything, now is a better time to recalibrate expectations, and bolster resilience. More on that ahead.

The earnings trend for big U.S. companies has been sublime. Consensus expectations for the S&P 500 have been steadily ratcheted higher. The latest calls for 17% earnings growth this year. To tell whether stocks in general are cheap, many investors look to the market’s price/earnings ratio. If the price has come down a little, and the earnings are going up a lot, the market starts to look reasonably priced. Based on projected earnings for the year ahead, the S&P 500’s P/E is 20, which, in a mathematical coincidence, is about 20% higher than the 20-year average—a premium, but not an excessive one.

Now consider a different measure, free cash flow. The index’s forward P/FCF ratio of 27.4 is 37% above its 20-year average. Suddenly the premium doesn’t seem as moderate.

Earnings and free cash flow are two ways of measuring the same thing: the money companies make after expenses. The difference between them normally doesn’t matter much for the market as a whole. But AI spending has made the current difference exceptionally wide: S&P companies are expected to earn $2.8 trillion this year but generate only $1.9 trillion in free cash.

The main difference between those figures has to do with the treatment of spending on big-ticket items like data centers and equipment, called capital expenditures, or capex. Earnings accounting doesn’t subtract capex when the money is actually spent. Instead, it deducts it little by little over the projected useful life of the stuff being bought. There’s nothing scandalous about that. It’s called the matching principle. Accountants try to match big, lumpy investments with the yearslong income they produce by pretending the spending is stretched out.

Free cash flow doesn’t pretend anything. In fact, it’s not an accounting measure. Companies aren’t required to report it on financial tables, although many volunteer it on news releases and slide decks. To calculate it yourself, start with a financial report line item called cash from operations, and then fully subtract capex.

We apologize for bringing arithmetic into this–we’ll try not to let it happen again. But the difference between earnings and free cash flow matters a lot now, for two reasons. First, we’ve never seen so many companies spend this much, this suddenly. Look at Amazon.com. Two years ago, nine analysts had ventured estimates of the free cash flow Amazon would generate by 2026. They ranged from $76 billion to $126 billion, with an average of $105 billion–a staggering haul reached only by two companies, ever: Apple and Saudi Arabia’s oil monopoly. Today, the 2026 consensus estimate for Amazon stands at $11 billion–of cash burn, not free cash flow.

Of course, Amazon hasn’t fallen on hard times. It has gone all-in on building AI computing power as quickly as possible. That might well pay off. Amazon has a long history of successful investing, and of profitably renting out the computing heft that it builds. But Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta Platforms, and others are spending lavishly, too. Meta, whose capex is estimated at $122 billion this year, or five times what it was spending five years ago, doesn’t sell cloud computing. We’ll be interested to see how these investments do, but for our purposes here, it’s simply the scale and speed of the ramp-up that matters.

That brings us to the second reason that the difference between free cash flow and earnings is particularly important now: Although earnings don’t subtract right away for all of this AI spending, they do fully add the money that flows to companies on the receiving end of the spending. For now, by mostly telling only the happy part of the story, earnings are left puffed up.

Nvidia, the AI chip king, will likely turn the biggest corporate profit in history in its fiscal year ending next January. The estimate stands at $200 billion. Until three years ago, the company had never earned more than $10 billion in a year. Other data-center arms dealers whose earnings have suddenly multiplied include memory maker Micron Technology, expected to make $66 billion this year, the fifth largest contribution to the S&P 500’s total, and chip designer Broadcom, $56 billion and ninth largest.

The sustainability of this spending matters a great deal for deciding whether stocks are expensive. But at the very least, investors should make sure the spending is counted when they’re sizing up the market. On an index level, free cash flow does the fairest job of that now, and it says that prices are high.

Let’s go through two more factors that have blessedly little to do with AI, and have been many years in the making.

Marvelous Margins

In general, corporations are much more profitable than they used to be. Across the economy, their cumulative profit margin has recently been around 12%, even before the AI binge. For the four decades through 2000, it averaged 5.3% and topped 7% only once—around when the dot-com stock bubble peaked.

On its own, this isn’t a bad thing. Since the 1980s the economy has grown less weighted in heavy industry, and more weighted in technology, which has brought structurally higher margins. Our profitability surge might be long-lasting, or even permanent. But some signs should give investors pause.

One of these signs is that the earnings split between workers and corporations has shifted a lot lately—corporations are getting a much bigger share of the gross-domestic-income pie, and workers, a meaningfully smaller one. We leave it to others to opine on whether the current split is optimal. Our focus here is investor returns. We note only that workers, of course, are also customers. If they’re struggling to keep up with costs, we’d expect to see consumer spending suffer. It hasn’t. But some economists see evidence of a so-called k-shaped economy, where the two legs of the k represent different income groups, with a relatively small slice of high earners boosting spending growth. Others note that credit card debt for low earners has been rising.

Here’s why this matters for corporate earnings: If it’s true that the rich are propping up the economy, earnings might be benefiting from a strong wealth effect. That’s the tendency of consumers to spend more when their stocks and home values are riding high. The S&P 500 index, even with its recent wobbles, has returned a stupendous 273% over the past decade, or more than 14% a year. A normal return for stocks over long time periods is closer to 10% a year before inflation. The Case-Shiller index of U.S. home prices is up 87% in a decade, or about 6.5% a year. The best estimate of a normal return there is the rate of inflation, which was 3.3% a year over the past decade.

Whatever level of profit margin is normal for companies now, if the current one is benefiting from a wealth effect, it’s boosting earnings and holding down P/E ratios. The problem is that the wealth effect works in reverse, too. Big price drops for the overall housing market are rare, but not unheard of. Ones for stocks are fairly common.

Government Assistance

You won’t be surprised to learn that the federal government will spend much more than it collects in taxes this year. It did so for much of the four decades to 2000, averaging deficits of 2% of GDP a year. But this year’s shortfall is estimated at 5.8%, rising to 6.7% in a decade. That’s emergency-level spending, only without the emergency, and with no end in sight. These deficits have accumulated into a monstrous debt. We’ve been hearing dire warnings about it for years, with little impact on interest rates or investor returns, so why worry now?

There are many reasons, but let’s focus on two. Social Security’s trust fund is expected to run dry in 2032, so either benefits will have to be cut by then, or taxes raised. Meanwhile, the U.S. in recent years has been borrowing at interest rates that exceed the nominal economic growth rate. Starting after 2031, without momentous changes, the interest rate on the entire debt will exceed the growth rate permanently, and increasingly. That’s what economists refer to as a debt spiral. It’s like a saver borrowing at 5% to fund a 3% certificate of deposit–the numbers don’t work.

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There are two choices for Congress: do something, or do nothing. Recent history says to bet on nothing. But what’s notable about these two fiscal cliffs is that they will arrive within the six-year term of a newly elected senator, which means we’ve reached the point where some of the people in charge will be around to own the mess. So maybe bet on something.

The problem is that huge deficits are stimulative, like a credit card advance on growth. This money trickles through the economy, and some of it ends up adding to the earnings of big, traded companies. This, too, holds P/E ratios lower than they otherwise would be. Dealing with deficits, whether through slashing spending or raising taxes, would have the opposite effect. If the approach involves raising corporate taxes, whatever the merits, it would subtract from earnings more directly. Overall corporate taxes are 20% of profits recently, versus an average of 35% for the four decades to 2000.

What Not to Do

The good news for investors is that high valuations for stocks have historically been a poor predictor of returns over the following year–a pricey market can and often does move higher. The bad news is that valuations have been a much stronger predictor of subsequent 10-year returns. Investors should count on only modest returns for the coming decade in their planning.

Here’s where financial salespeople present a miracle asset class that can reliably juice returns without adding risk. Except that those don’t exist, and the only thing reliably added are fees. The answers aren’t glamorous: Spend less. Save harder. Be prepared to work longer. Don’t go all-in on stocks and definitely don’t go all-out.

When deficits are unsustainable, one likely path forward involves running inflation hot. That can be bad for stocks in the near term, but over decades, companies that make and sell valuable things are the best vehicle for beating inflation. Stick with American stocks for the clever tech and cheap domestic energy, and overseas ones for lower valuations and a currency hedge.

Since it has been a while, we leave you with a reminder about long bear markets. The nasty thing about them is that they can pull the economy down with them. The investing novice says the market always comes back. The veteran says sure it does, but when your stocks crash, the probability of losing your job goes up, which means you’d better have a cash stockpile or stream of investment income to lean on, or you could end up selling stocks low. Ordinary money-market funds and dividend-focused stock funds both pay close to 3.5% now, and safe, short-term bonds, closer to 4%, versus the S&P 500’s yield of just 1%.

Here’s hoping the next long bear market is far off. But the best time to prepare for it is now.

Focus on retailers and suppliers set to benefit from the wave of demand, not the Big Tech players.

Global smart-glasses shipments more than quadrupled to 8.7 million units in 2025; Meta holds over 85% of the market.

Apple, Google, and Samsung are set to launch AI-equipped eyewear, but privacy concerns and mass adoption remain hurdles.

Suppliers like Qualcomm and EssilorLuxottica, and retailers such as Warby Parker, are poised to benefit from smart glasses growth.

Smart glasses could be the next big consumer hardware category, and everyone wants to cash in. Investors looking to play the trend should focus on retailers and suppliers set to benefit from the wave of demand.

The landscape has been transformed since the failure of Google Glass, the search company’s early foray into smart glasses that was axed in 2015. Improvements in design and the rise of artificial intelligence have led to huge advances. The vision of enthusiasts like Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg is that AI-equipped glasses could eventually replace the smartphone as the primary consumer device.

“[Smart glasses] can see what you can see and hear what you can hear, and you can have a conversation with it, like you’re talking to a person,” Akash Palkhiwala, Qualcomm’s chief financial officer, says. “It’s perfectly suited to have an agentic AI experience.”

Meta Sets the Pace

Meta has taken an early lead with its Ray-Ban-branded eyewear. According to Omdia, global shipments of smart glasses reached 8.7 million units in 2025, more than quadrupling year over year. Meta holds more than 85% of the market. Shipments are expected to reach 15 million this year.

Meta is seeking to cement its lead. On Tuesday, the company said it was expanding its range of smart glasses with two lines aimed at wearers of prescription lenses.

Apple, Google, and Samsung are all expected to launch AI-equipped eyewear soon. But smart glasses will need to scale significantly to make a meaningful contribution for major tech companies. Revenue for Meta’s Reality Labs segment, which includes wearables, was $2.21 billion in 2025, up from $2.15 billion in 2024—a relatively small contribution. Meta doesn’t disclose smart-glasses revenue separately.

Some Wall Street analysts think certain Big Tech brands are better set up for success than their rivals. J.P. Morgan’s Samik Chatterjee estimates Apple could ship 50 million pairs of smart glasses by the end of the decade, worth more than $15 billion in revenue.

Some companies could benefit sooner. EssilorLuxottica, Meta’s manufacturing partner and the owner of Ray-Ban, has already been a major beneficiary. The group hit record highs in late 2025 on rising sales of smart glasses and a reported $3.5 billion investment from Meta. With a market cap of just over $100 billion, EssilorLuxottica has joined the ranks of Europe’s 30 largest public companies.

However, EssilorLuxottica shares have pulled back sharply since last year amid concerns about competition from Apple and Alphabet’s Google. And market share is not the only headwind—there is no guarantee smart glasses will achieve mass adoption or navigate global regulations.

Privacy is the immediate hurdle. Meta and EssilorLuxottica face a lawsuit in the U.S. seeking class-action status over concerns that data collection from smart glasses violates users’ privacy. The claim alleges video captured on the devices is routed to contractors in Africa for AI training purposes, citing whistle-blower complaints.

Meta and EssilorLuxottica didn’t respond to requests for comment. Meta has previously said media stays on a user’s device unless they choose to share it with the company, and that it filters content to protect privacy.

Smart Shopping

New entrants will have to overcome such challenges. In the U.S., Warby Parker is the eyewear partner for Alphabet’s Google. Its stock jumped when the partnership was announced, alongside a $75 million investment from Google.

Warby Parker’s partnerships with Google and Samsung could allow it to double its market share in smart glasses compared with traditional eyewear, according to Stifel analyst Peter McGoldrick. He has a $25 target price and a Hold rating on shares trading near $21, and forecasts sales of about 700,000 pairs by 2030. He noted stronger adoption could push that as high as four million pairs.

Eyewear retailer National Vision is another potential winner. The company plans to roll out Meta smart glasses to all its stores by the end of the second quarter. By 2030, it could generate around 10% of sales and an even larger share of earnings from smart glasses, according to UBS analyst Michael Lasser, who has a Buy rating and a $42 target price. National Vision shares trade near $26 and have more than doubled in the past year as the company focuses on premium products.

Counting Chips

Two large-cap companies already generating revenue from optical hardware are chip companies Qualcomm and GlobalFoundries. Qualcomm aims for more than $2 billion in revenue from extended-reality devices, including smart glasses, by 2029. CFO Palkhiwala told Barron’s the company is “well ahead” of that target, although the stock has fallen 23% over the past 12 months amid concerns about the company’s core smartphone market.

“Qualcomm is the most important merchant supplier because it already sits at the center of Meta’s smart glasses effort and has the broadest commercial wearable/extended reality platform,” said Shay Boloor, chief market strategist at Futurum Equities.

While Qualcomm provides the central processor—the brain behind smart specs— GlobalFoundries makes components for displays and radio signals. Its display technology will be key as the market shifts toward glasses with built-in screens.

GlobalFoundries’ senior vice president of end markets, Faisal Saleem, envisions a world where 10% of glasses wearers adopt smart versions, meaning 300 million customers replacing pairs every two years.

“This is over a billion dollars’ worth of opportunity for all the foundries combined,” Saleem says. “I think we have a really good shot at being the dominant player for this particular category.”

Power and Intellectual Property

Batteries are another key component. Nasdaq-traded Enovix, a specialist in high-energy-density, silicon-anode batteries, is one U.S. player to watch. Benchmark Research analyst Mickey Legg has a Buy rating and a $25 target price. Struggles in the smartphone market have pushed shares down more than 30% over the past year to around $5, but smart glasses offer potential for a turnaround.

“Smart eyewear remains a nascent market with no clear incumbent, offering Enovix an opportunity to establish early leadership,” Legg wrote.

A more speculative bet is augmented-reality hardware specialist Vuzix. While its product revenue is negligible by Big Tech standards and it has a market cap of just $200 million, it claims more than 450 patents and patents pending, along with intellectual-property licenses across optics, head-mounted displays, and wearables.

“Augmented reality could end up looking a lot like the royalty layer in smartphones, where a small set of IP owners extract value from a much larger hardware ecosystem,” Boloor said.

The shift from niche to mainstream appears under way for smart glasses. The entry of Apple and Google should add momentum and spur innovation around privacy and cost. Picking a winner may be difficult, but backing the suppliers and retailers enabling the ecosystem could be the smarter way to play the smart glasses revolution.

Who Needs Las Vegas When You Have a Casino in Your Pocket?

Las Vegas is hoping that rapid growth in high-tech businesses and logistics will offset its stagnant gaming industry.

Las Vegas visitation dropped 7.5% in 2025, the sharpest annual decline since 1970, with Canadian visitors down nearly a quarter.

Las Vegas is diversifying beyond gaming, developing into a hub for logistics, high-tech start-ups, and expanding its healthcare sector.

Following Reno’s successful diversification into tech and manufacturing, Las Vegas aims to integrate new industries alongside enduring gaming.

LAS VEGAS—Sin City isn’t luring enough sinners.

Visitations have been declining. Real estate prices are falling. The metro area’s 5.2% unemployment rate is nearly a percentage point higher than it is nationally. But you don’t need those statistics to know that all is not right in Las Vegas.

Outside, the pulsing Saturday night crowds on the Strip dwindle fast. By midweek, many pedestrians sport convention badges, showcasing one of the city’s few tourism bright spots. On one block, an older man hands out fliers for an adult entertainment venue while another sits on an overturned bucket, takeaway food containers arranged like plastic soldiers at his swollen feet. The Bellagio fountains draw crowds, but elsewhere sidewalks have only sporadic foot traffic.

In the cavernous casinos, shop windows reflect on empty corridors, luxury goods sparkle unseen under spotlights. It feels like a party at the mall that ended hours before.

The reasons for the city’s woes are many—competition, inflation, geopolitics—and many Vegas casino stocks have underperformed the S&P 500

in recent years. At first glance, it seems like Vegas could be headed for a fate worse than death; consider that Atlantic City, N.J., never got its mojo back after gambling faltered.

The travails of Las Vegas come at a time when Americans are gambling more than ever. The problem is that much of the new business is going online to sports betting sites and prediction markets. That’s a big reason that Vegas has seen a drop in visitations, even as other domestic tourist destinations are having good years.

Yet the pearl-clutching (or rhinestone-clutching?) about Vegas’ future overlooks the fact that the city is already working on its next act. While gambling revenue has been stagnant for decades, casinos have been offsetting it by offering other attractions, from shows to spas to world-class restaurants.

The far more important transformation is happening outside the gambling industry. Sin City is turning itself into a hub for logistics and high-tech start-ups staffed by highly educated white-collar and skilled professionals. At the same, the metro area’s warm weather, moderate costs, and lack of state income tax is luring retirees, and the city’s healthcare sector is rapidly expanding to accommodate them.

Las Vegas even has a model for its ambitions some 400 miles to the north in smaller Reno, Nev., which has become an industrial hot spot. In a best-case scenario, Las Vegas tourism recovers even as new industries grow and expand.

“[Las Vegas] will still be a world-class city for leisure, hospitality and gaming, but we need strong secondary industries,” says Andrew Woods, director of the University of Nevada Las Vegas’ Center for Business and Economic Research. “We’re living through a time where states and communities have to make their own destinies.”

The Black Fire Innovation institute at the UNLV campus is a success story. It opened in 2020 in collaboration with Caesars Entertainment

and has fueled both tech innovation and early-stage start-up companies. Two spinouts include Quantum Copper, commercializing a polymer technology with fire-retardant characteristics that can improve the safety of electric-vehicle batteries, and WAVR Technologies, focused on atmospheric water harvesting—a key technology in an arid state.

Las Vegas has other wins, too. Air Liquide opened its largest liquid hydrogen production and logistics infrastructure facility in North Las Vegas. Haddington Dynamics is a Las Vegas–based robotics and automation company, and Paysign is a fintech company in neighboring Henderson, Nev.

Las Vegas needs such new players to counter its ailing casino industry. Visitation dropped 7.5% in 2025, the sharpest annual drop since record-keeping began in 1970, excluding the pandemic years. President Donald Trump’s aggressive stance toward Canada is part of the problem. The northern neighbor is Las Vegas’ biggest foreign market, but those visitors dropped by nearly a quarter last year, or about 200,000—the steepest annual decline in half a century, excluding the Covid-19 pandemic. Direct flights from South Korea mean passenger traffic from that country is up by more than a quarter, but those numbers aren’t enough to offset the decline.

Overall, 2026 may be another mediocre year: Early estimates had visitation inching up, but considering the war in Iran, high gas prices at home, and headaches at the airport, some of those expected tourists may not materialize.

And Las Vegas is no longer a cheap getaway. In 2025, the average daily room rate was $183.52, up from $132.69 in 2019, and nearly every major hotel on the Strip charges a daily resort fee on top of that. Formerly free perks like parking are now another cost, as are the drinks that used to be complimentary for gamblers.

The casinos are squeezing gamblers to increase their take. Many roulette wheels now feature three zero spaces instead of two, while blackjack tables often offer $6 payouts for every $5 bet rather than the former 3:2 ratio, reducing players’ winnings. More than ever, “the odds are against the gambler,” says Kevin Gale, co-chief investment officer at wealth management firm Ancora.

Despite that, running casinos hasn’t been a great business for a while. Gaming revenue has been basically stagnant for nearly three decades, when adjusted for inflation. And online sports betting is now luring away new customers. The number of 20-something travelers in Las Vegas is roughly half prepandemic levels.

“Virtually every state has gaming now; the younger generation is face-to-phone, busy sports gambling; the trade war is a big hindrance to Canadian tourism; and like everywhere else, the cost of everything has gone up,” says Gale. “Las Vegas is being hit with a confluence of multiple things at once.”

The pain is reflected in the stocks of casinos, including Caesars Entertainment, Wynn Resorts, and Golden Entertainment. Shares of VICI Properties, the city’s major real estate investment trust that owns iconic properties like Caesars Palace and the Venetian, have gone nowhere over the past five years, hurt by a mixed earnings record, concerns about its debt load, and uncertainty about its casino tenants.

Plenty of old Las Vegas staples are gone, and high prices are keeping some visitors away.

Plenty of old Las Vegas staples are gone...

Plenty of old Las Vegas staples are gone, and high prices are keeping some visitors away.

...and high prices are keeping some visitors away.

Las Vegas has remade itself before. The 2007-09 financial crisis was a wake-up call to the state. The Nevada Governor’s Office of Economic Development began operations in 2012 with a mission to create a more sustainable economy and high-paying jobs, and it has made significant progress, says the office’s senior director of Strategic Programs & Innovation, Karsten Heise. Wins include the Google data center in Henderson and CAE’s state-of-the-art flight training center overlooking Harry Reid International Airport.

Nevada itself should provide a tailwind. The state was the third-fastest growing in terms of new businesses with employees created after the pandemic, with some 7,000 new formations in December 2025 alone, leading to a 12% year-over-year jump in business licensing fees that month.

Allegiant Stadium hosted the 2024 Super Bowl just four years after it was erected to lure the Raiders pro football team to Las Vegas. And the storied Tropicana Hotel on the Strip was demolished to make room for a new baseball stadium for when the Oakland Athletics move to Las Vegas in 2028. NHL hockey is already in town, and NBA basketball is likely to follow.

Healthcare employment in Nevada has doubled over two decades, with another 28% bump projected by 2030. Demographics are on healthcare’s side, with one in five people in the Las Vegas suburb of Henderson above the age of 65. Chris Loftus, chief executive of West Henderson Hospital, says that a state bill, SB5, should further boost healthcare in Nevada by recruiting doctors and expediting the credentialing process.

Other solutions can use government help as well. Nevada has potentially the largest lithium deposit in the world, but it has been lagging behind in terms of incentivizing intermediary steps like refining that could provide true vertical integration for local battery and electronics makers.

Skeptics say that Las Vegas can’t wean itself from its slots-based economy. Yet in many ways, a framework for transformation exists within its own state, roughly seven hours up Highway 95.

Reno was in such dire straits after the 2007-09 recession that “it felt like we had to diversify and grow or simply accept oblivion as a fate,” says Fred Steinmann, director of the University Center for Economic Development at the University of Nevada, Reno’s College of Business.

Today, things look different. The region has leaned more into outdoor leisure—including Lake Tahoe—while tech and manufacturing have stolen the show. Reno’s growing Lithium Loop tech hub includes the Tesla-Panasonic Gigafactory, battery recycler Redwood Materials (begun by a Tesla veteran), and battery maker Dragonfly Energy Holdings, which traces its roots to the University of Nevada campus in Reno.

The collaboration among “companies, the University of Nevada, and the Nevada Tech Hub creates a practical environment to design, prototype, and manufacture,” says Dragonfly CEO Denis Phares.

Employees prepare key electronic components that regulate performance and safety in lithium battery packs at Dragonfly Energy’s manufacturing facility. (Photograph by Bridget Bennett)

The university is leaning hard into that success. Its College of Engineering is opening a new semiconductor nanofabrication and advanced materials lab, one of just a dozen such U.S. facilities.

Reno has attracted so many companies, and incubated new ones, that its economy is already more resilient, even as its downtown casinos lose business to tribal casinos in Northern California. The city, which took the better part of a decade to fully recover from the 2007-09 recession, reported real gross domestic product of $34 billion in 2023, up from less than $23 billion in 2010—and economic growth in Reno’s Washoe County is outpacing that of Las Vegas’ Clark County for the first time in decades.

A cautionary tale, of course, lies 2,500 miles away in Atlantic City. The famous New Jersey seaside resort town went from credibly calling itself the World’s Playground during its 1920’s golden age, when it boasted a Ritz Carlton, to being a punchline a few decades later, hurt by corruption and competition. Although it is seeing a modest visitation revival postpandemic, it remains just an echo of its heyday, its downtown hampered by crime and high vacancies.

Las Vegas’ world-famous Strip and long history means it’s unlikely to suffer that fate—nor is it likely to swap casinos for semiconductors wholesale. Gaming will endure but increasingly share the spotlight with new businesses, wellness resorts, and professional sports. The popularity of the Sphere entertainment and music area in nearby Paradise, Nev., alongside the rally in Sphere Entertainment, show that there is still a strong appetite for novel, exclusive entertainment. “Only in Vegas” is more than a slogan—it’s a recipe for bringing people back.

It is, however, working to attract new residents, visitors, and businesses alike, a process that’s advancing slowly but surely. Clark County is home to multiple Nevada Tech Hub consortium members as well as natural attractions like the Valley of Fire and Red Rock Canyon, so borrowing some lessons from Reno is a feasible way to broaden its economic base.

The casino stocks themselves look dicier, at least until tourism turns around. Caesars’ turnaround could come to fruition next year if the company delivers its first annual per-share profit since 2023, but that’s a high-risk bet. Likewise, Wynn’s Macau business is finally nearing prepandemic levels, spurring growth hopes, though the Iran war is a big question mark over its United Arab Emirates expansion. Nearby Red Rock Resorts casino may be a safer option to play Vegas’s population boom, as the new Durango Casino & Resorts caters to more-local crowds and has seen success positioning itself at the higher end of the market.

Betting Las Vegas writ large can make a comeback is a wager worth making. Betting on the gaming stocks may take some patience.

Dealers want to see a fuller lineup but a turnaround will be expensive and difficult

This past week, the auto industry descended on New York to unveil its latest models. Nearly half a million people were expected to pass through the sprawling Javits Convention Center, from industry bigwigs to families just coming to ogle hundreds of new vehicles on display.

One auto chief executive, Matt McAlear, took the stage at the New York International Auto Show to make a bold declaration: “We’re here to make things people didn’t see coming.”

Behind that CEO was a pair of Chrysler Pacifica minivans—slightly altered with new headlamps and updated features, or what the auto industry calls a “refresh.” At most brands, such an update wouldn’t merit much fanfare.

For Chrysler, however, a marginal refresh of the only model it sells was a welcome pulse check.

The brand that invented the minivan in the 1980s, and with it a style that became shorthand for American suburban family life, is fighting for survival. Chrysler is one of 14 big car brands owned by the European-American conglomerate Stellantis, a big portfolio compared to General Motors’s four or Ford’s two. And Chrysler is the only major brand to sell just one model.

McAlear said he’s one of the people fighting for Chrysler’s future. Stellantis’s upcoming investor day in May will shed additional light on the future direction of the brand, he said.

“We’re here to make the Chrysler brand feel unexpected again, sharper, unapologetic and, yeah, a lot more attitude than people expect from a minivan brand,” he said. “A minivan brand for now.”

A turnaround will be expensive and difficult. Stellantis will either need to invest a lot more. Or it may need to consider the unthinkable.

For much of its existence, the Chrysler name has been intrinsically tied to Detroit’s Big Three automakers. Crosstown rivals General Motors and Ford Motor have generally always sold more cars, and Chrysler was affectionately called the “little brother” of the car triumvirate. This often made it scrappy and innovative, however, often pioneering technologies like better automatic transmissions, cruise control and four-wheel anti-lock brakes.

A seemingly endless string of corporate mergers, over time, starved the Chrysler name of resources and different models to sell. Ten years ago, it sold two sedans in addition to its minivan. Twenty years ago, Chrysler’s sprawling lineup included midsize and large sedans, an SUV, the quirky PT Cruiser wagon, a sports car and multiple convertibles.

The Pacifica is all that’s left today. Chrysler’s sales last year were down 80% compared to two decades ago. Last year, it sold about 126,000 cars.

Stellantis also owns Jeep, Maserati, Peugeot, Fiat and Alfa Romeo. It was created in a 2021 merger to give those brands the capital to take on the industry’s new challenges like electrification and autonomous driving.

But Stellantis posted a $25 billion loss in 2025, much of which it blamed on a pivot away from electric vehicles in the U.S. Meanwhile, the whole industry is threatened by upstart, high-tech Chinese carmakers that are making lower-cost vehicles.

Big car brand names have died before, like General Motors’ Pontiac and Oldsmobile, or even Chrysler’s onetime family member Plymouth. While GM, Ford and Chrysler together once overwhelmingly dominated American sales, they are now heavily eclipsed by foreign automakers, including ones that make cars in the U.S.

McAlear, 48, was running the Dodge brand when the company tapped him several weeks ago to oversee Chrysler as well. McAlear’s father retired from a career at Chrysler, he said in an interview on the sidelines of the auto show this week. He rode in Chrysler cars from the time he was born.

“It’s my responsibility to be a steward of the brand and set it up for the next person,” McAlear said. The company owes it to its dealers to position Chrysler to be successful and “sell in volume beyond just one nameplate,” he added.

Few car brands carry the kind of name recognition of Chrysler, which alone could drive sales, dealers say. The Pacifica has been America’s top-selling minivan for years. Chrysler just needs an actual portfolio of vehicles to sell, they say.

“Nobody knows Stellantis in this country,” said Jeff Dyke, president of Sonic Automotive, one of the largest car retailers in the U.S. “They sure as hell know Chrysler.”

The brand delivered aerodynamically groundbreaking cars in the 1930s and luxurious land yachts in the ‘60s and ‘70s with “Fine Corinthian Leather.” Generations of American families grew up in Chrysler minivans such as the Town & Country in the ‘80s and ‘90s. The Chrysler 300C sedan of the 2000s became a mainstay in hip-hop videos.

In 2005, nearly 650,000 Chrysler brand vehicles were sold in the U.S., or one out of every four cars for then-parent company DaimlerChrysler.

Then came Chrysler’s sale to a private-equity company in 2007, followed by its bankruptcy, bailout and takeover by Italy’s Fiat, creating Fiat Chrysler Automobiles. In 2021, that company merged with France’s PSA Group to form Stellantis. Highly profitable brands Jeep and Ram took priority.

“They’ve let Chrysler go on the backshelf for a while,” said Steven Wolf, a Texas dealer who started out in the 1970s as a Chrysler dealer.

Today, Wolf sells Stellantis’s other core American brands as well, including Jeep, Ram and Dodge. He’s championed the idea of having a Chrysler model to sell that’s not a minivan.

Around the end of the 1930s, Randy Bierlein’s grandfather first started selling Chrysler vehicles out of his family’s dealership in northern Michigan. The dealership, Schaefer & Bierlein, lays claim to being the country’s oldest.

A fifth-generation owner, Bierlein had ambitions to work for the Chrysler corporation when he got out of college in the early 1970s. Everyone told him he was crazy. He was lucky to sell Chrysler’s cars, he said. So he stayed put.

“Chrysler was always at the top of the food chain in our world,” Bierlein said.

The Schaefer & Bierlein shop in Frankenmuth, Mich., exudes Chrysler. The company’s Pentastar logo is fashioned into the tile on the dealership’s floor. Bierlein’s son, Kyle, is currently CEO of the dealership. When Kyle and his brother acquired some Ford and Chevrolet dealerships two years ago, Randy refused to wear the new family-branded pullover that also bore the logos of Chrysler’s longtime rivals.

“It sat here for a year,” Kyle said. “That’s the loyalty, that’s what he had his whole life.”

Dealers typically retain buyers by selling them one car in a line and then upgrading them to another model a few years later. But Chrysler dealers, Kyle says, are at a disadvantage because there’s only the Pacifica minivan. Some buyers who want an SUV recoil at the thought of owning a Jeep, but there isn’t a Chrysler SUV to offer them.

“Chrysler doesn’t need to come out with a competitor for the Corvette or a Viper or anything like that,” Kyle said. “That’s not what we’re looking for. We need small, midsize SUVs, maybe a sedan, something that we can pump out to people who want them.”

Randy remembers selling Chryslers in the 1970s when the brand was in the midst of its first modern existential threat: the oil crisis.

Sales of Chrysler’s gas-guzzling coupes and sedans were tanking. Lee Iacocca, an iconoclastic ex-Ford executive, was brought in to rescue the company from near-bankruptcy. Iacocca secured a U.S. government loan and revamped the lineup to save the day.

Iacocca’s turnaround worked, bolstered by the launch of a successful minivan line under sister brands Dodge and Plymouth. A new Chrysler LeBaron brought convertibles back to America after a years-long absence. Iacocca also expanded the Chrysler brand to include less-premium, more affordable models.

But the late 1990s merger between Mercedes-Benz parent Daimler and Chrysler hardly led to a turnaround for the namesake brand. Cultures clashed, synergies failed to materialize and profits sank.

Dealers loved the Chrysler 300, which had a good amount of Mercedes hardware under the skin, but the brand struggled to adapt to a world where SUVs began to rule American roads.

The brand’s lineup has only dwindled since. Today, the Chrysler nameplate is often sandwiched in at Jeep, Dodge and Ram dealerships.

The 2021 creation of Stellantis was supposed to be a reversal of fortunes for the Chrysler name. Carlos Tavares, the merged automaker’s first CEO, had ambitions of shepherding Chrysler along with the company’s other brands into an all-electric future.

“We are now preparing for the rebound of this brand,” Tavares said of Chrysler in mid-2021.

But at the end of 2024, with Jeep and Ram dealers in revolt over high sticker prices, Tavares and the company’s board agreed to part ways. Tavares declined to comment.

The company brought in Fiat and Jeep veteran Antonio Filosa as CEO, and he is emphasizing the importance of the U.S. market and the need to regain lost market share.

The then-CEO of Chrysler, Chris Feuell, said a compact car priced below $30,000 was underway. The brand also started selling a cheaper version of the Pacifica, called the Voyager. She pinned high hopes on the new Pacifica minivan.

Last month, Feuell left the company, citing personal reasons. Feuell didn’t respond to requests for comment. New products, like a long-teased crossover SUV or electric vehicles, never materialized.

In New York, McAlear said things are changing. “We’re going to have a lot more fun in the coming months,” he said in front of the updated minivan. He touted familiar features like Stow ’n Go seats, which fold into the floor to maximize storage space, and a camera that lets parents see what their kids are doing in the back seats.

“Could you resurrect a brand? Yes, you could,” said Larry Dominique, a former Stellantis senior vice president who left the company in 2024 after decades in executive and product planning roles. “It’s going to take time, a lot of resources, and focus. It’s not impossible, but it’s definitely challenging.”

When you connect medical records and health data to a chatbot, you get results. But you must understand the risks.

As the lab technician prepared my vials, I told him, “I’m going to upload my blood work to AI!”

His response: “Oh boy.”

I agreed. I was more nervous about opening up my medical records to a chatbot than getting my arm pricked.

Others are already doing it. One-third of U.S. adults have turned to artificial intelligence for health advice in the past year, and of those, around 41% uploaded personal medical information to the chatbot, according to a recent survey from the health nonprofit KFF.

Data sharing is getting even easier. In recent months, the most popular AI apps—OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Perplexity and Microsoft’s Copilot—unveiled ways to connect your wearables and medical records.

A headache can be benign or life-threatening depending on the context. In the white-hot AI race, a model that can help us navigate that medical complexity—and make sense of our growing pile of health data—could gain an edge.

I let Claude and Perplexity access my health data to search for hidden patterns in my personal metrics, and better understand what the risks are. After lots of prompting, I found that the bots are expert explainers, though occasionally prone to overstatement. I awarded the top chatbot a 🏆 in three scenarios.

And the experience drove home a truth I have long warned about: Gaining AI-enabled medical clarity means losing some privacy. And no, HIPAA doesn’t apply merely because these companies can access your health network’s data.

Sharing the data

Any chatbot will give you an answer to “My back hurts. What should I do?”

These new health-focused AI features offer more personalized responses based on everything you’ve shared. If, say, you’ve had a stomach ulcer, the bot would recommend a painkiller that’s easy on the gut.

OpenAI and Microsoft haven’t made their services widely available yet. Claude and Perplexity’s are in beta, but already available to paying U.S. subscribers (starting at $20 a month) right now. The integrations are off by default—you have to opt in. Sharing Apple Health data was as simple as flipping a switch.

To link my medical records, I had to identify myself to health data connectors that work with the AI companies. For Claude, HealthEx needed my birth date, phone number, face scan and a driver’s license for verification. For Perplexity, B.well took me directly to my medical provider’s portal to grant access.

I could select which categories of information to share with the AI bots, such as medications, and lab results. The more you give the AI, the more personalized the response can be, so I granted full access.

Prompting the bots

Accuracy is essential for health queries, and AI bots are known to make up information. So I consulted Dr. Sumant Ranji, a professor of clinical medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.

Ranji was clear he didn’t endorse this practice: “I would definitely not recommend that patients upload their medical records to any AI due to lack of privacy standards.” But he went along with my experiment.

🤖 Prompt #1: What’s my risk for cardiovascular disease? The bots scanned my lipid panels and Apple Watch heart-rate data. The verdict: I’m low risk. I preferred Claude’s scannable format, which used tables and emojis for clarity.

However, Ranji said Perplexity’s response was closer to how he counsels patients. He approved of the AI requesting age and other information for context, and said its “bottom line”—that long-term risk is never zero—was correct.

Claude’s advice, while similar, overemphasized data from my smartwatch, Ranji said. “VO2 max” is a health measurement that suggests how fit you are based on metrics like heart rate during activity. Claude thought mine was “trending volatile.”

Ranji dismissed the “scary-sounding” phrasing, noting that wearable data isn’t clinically reliable. An Anthropic spokesman said the AI is designed to help people navigate complex information and isn’t a substitute for professional medical care.

🏆 The winner: Perplexity

🤖 Prompt #2: What supplements should I take for improved sleep and fitness? For his own recommendation, Ranji consulted an AI bot popular among doctors: OpenEvidence. The free tool pulls its responses from medical journals.

OpenEvidence doesn’t have my information, but its advice to take magnesium and creatine was consistent with suggestions from Perplexity and Claude. It even gave extra female-specific advice, including omega-3 for post-workout recovery.

Perplexity and Claude did point out that my iron levels haven’t been tested, and if they’re low, a supplement could increase energy levels. While Claude suggested a few more supplements than Perplexity, their overall responses were similar.

🏆 The winner: OpenEvidence

🤖 Prompt #3: I’ve been fatigued for three weeks and woke up with a sore throat. Help? Both bots identified dips in my heart-rate variability data and an increase in resting heart rate from my smartwatch, which could indicate my body has been fighting an illness. Perplexity ruled out infection, based on my recent lab results.

Perplexity advised rest and fluids, while Claude also recommended zinc lozenges and saltwater gargles. And it reminded me to pause my Peloton training, recalling an earlier conversation about workouts.

Ranji said the advice from both bots was “practical.”

🏆 The winner: A tie!

Ranji pointed out that none of these cases were emergencies. A recent study in Nature Medicine found that, in early-access testing, OpenAI’s new ChatGPT Health had trouble with emergencies. In one instance, it referred a case of impending respiratory failure to overnight evaluation instead of an ER. An OpenAI spokeswoman said the study doesn’t reflect typical health conversations in ChatGPT.

Ranji also worried past conversations, such as one on homeopathic treatments, could steer the AI away from evidence-based results.

Perplexity said it keeps health chats siloed from general conversations. Anthropic said while Claude health conversations are part of the chatbot’s memory, any specific memory can be deleted in settings at any time. Claude is also designed to provide evidence-based health information, regardless of prior conversations, the spokesman said.

Health data is considered confidential to prevent insurance discrimination and employment bias.

Dr. Ami Bhatt, a cardiologist and the chief innovation officer of the American College of Cardiology, said this data is vulnerable when patients use chatbots, which don’t offer healthcare-grade privacy and security protections. Bhatt wants patients to understand before using chatbots how their health data will be stored or shared.

SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS

Have you ever consulted AI for health issues? How was the outcome? Join the conversation below.

After this experiment, I’ll purge any health-related memories and conversations. AI is moving fast, and I don’t want my data caught up in a version of the technology we haven’t met yet.

Anthropic and Perplexity say that users’ health data isn’t used to train models and can be disconnected at any time. (Anthropic offers a HIPAA-ready enterprise version of Claude for healthcare providers.)

Bhatt recognizes that the desire to turn to AI isn’t just the allure of chatbots—it’s a reaction to the current state of healthcare. “We have an access problem,” she says. “We have fewer clinicians than we do patients, and that disparity is going to increase.”

I relate. My results were normal so my doctor didn’t follow up. But I wanted to know more about my numbers, and AI filled that gap.

**Four Journalistic Investigations Put LVMH's Communications Team Under Pressure**

The group's head of external relations, Jean-Charles Trehan, already overwhelmed by the recent uncontrolled media outing of Hélène Mercier-Arnault, now faces a series of investigations set to hit newsstands and bookshops.

The LVMH group, and in particular the family of CEO Bernard Arnault, is about to make front pages at newsstands — and perhaps feature prominently in bookshop displays — before the end of the year. Enough to make the communications teams of the world's leading luxury group decidedly jittery, starting with Jean-Charles Trehan, its powerful head of external relations since 2017.

Thirteen years after *L'Ange exterminateur* by journalist Airy Routier (Albin Michel), the last unauthorised biography of the luxury boss, a new portrait book will be published in autumn, written in English by two Wall Street Journal journalists, Nick Kostov and Stacy Meichtry, and published by St Martin's Press. Over the summer, a six-part series in *Le Monde*, penned by Raphaëlle Bacqué and Vanessa Schneider, will take stock of Bernard Arnault and his group in the midst of a generational transition. Like the 2018 series on Karl Lagerfeld, this one could well give rise to a book in an expanded edition. An investigation in *L'Express* is also planned before the summer. More imminently — just a few days before the AGM on 23 April — *Le Nouvel Obs* will publish its own piece, less than two years after its cover story on "The influential Bernard Arnault" that ran at the end of 2024.

**The Financial Communications Team on Edge Too**

A veritable avalanche, then, for a group accustomed to exercising tight control over what is written about it — leveraging both its position as owner of a significant portion of the financial press (*Les Echos*, *Challenges*, *Boursier.com*, etc.) and its clout as a major advertiser with the magazine press. Jean-Charles Trehan, who operates in the shadow of Antoine Arnault — head of the group's image and the eldest of the Arnault sons — appears increasingly strained in his efforts to keep family rifts under wraps. He had already been completely wrong-footed in February by the peculiar media outing of Hélène Mercier-Arnault.

That operation had allowed the pianist to give her version of the family situation, while also promoting her latest record. It had been organised behind the group's back by Louis Jublin, the personal new impresario of Bernard Arnault's wife (*La Lettre* of 24/02/26 and 27/02/26). In the midst of the communications crisis, Jean-Charles Trehan and LVMH's communications director, Hélène Freyss, politely kept silent, while politicians and comedians were quick to seize on the remarks made by France's first lady of luxury regarding taxes and public spending — and then on the homeless, once the various RTL rushes were leaked by *Le Canard Enchaîné*, *Mediapart* and *Blast*.

The communications teams are not the only ones on edge. CFO Cécile Cabanis is also fielding an ever-growing number of questions from investors and analysts about the CEO's age and succession plans. Together with LVMH's deputy chief executive Stéphane Bianchi, she is bracing for an AGM at which the topic is likely to surface, while the first-quarter results — due to be announced on 13 April — are unlikely to reassure retail shareholders.

Le directeur des relations exterieures du groupe, Jean-Charles Trehan, deja depasse par la recente sortie mediatique non controlee d'Helene Mercier-Arnault, doit desormais faire face a une serie d'enquetes a venir en kiosque et en librairie.

Le groupe LVMH, et en particulier la famille du PDG Bernard Arnault, va faire la Une des kiosques et peut-etre jouer les tetes de gondole en librairie d'ici a la fin de l'annee. De quoi rendre febriles les equipes de communication du leader mondial du luxe, a commencer par Jean-Charles Trehan, son puissant directeur des relations exterieures depuis 2017.

Treize ans apres L'Ange exterminateur du journaliste Airy Routier (Albin Michel), derniere biographie non autorisee du boss du luxe, un nouveau livre portrait parattra a l'automne, ecrit en anglais par deux journalistes du Wall Street Journal, Nick Kostov et Stacy Meichtry, publie par St Martin's Press. Pendant l'ete, une serie du Monde en six episodes sous les plumes de Raphaelle Bacque et Vanessa Schneider fera le point sur Bernard Arnault et son groupe en pleine transition generationnelle. Comme celle de 2018 sur Karl Lagerfeld, cette serie est susceptible de donner naissance a un livre, dans une version augmentee. Une enquete dans

L'Express est aussi prevue avant l'ete. A plus courte echeance, soit quelques jours avant

l'assemblee generale du 23 avril, Le Nouvel Obs sortira la sienne, moins de deux ans apres celle sur "L'influent Bernard Arnault" qui avait fait la Une fin 2024.

La com' financiere a cran aussi

Une avalanche, done, pour un groupe habitue a contr6ler fortement ce qui s'ecrit sur lui en tirant parti a la fois de son rang de proprietaire d'un large segment de la presse economique (Les Echos, Challenges, Boursier.com, etc.) et de sa position de force comme annonceur aupres de la presse magazine. Jean-Charles Trehan, qui ceuvre dans l'ombre d'Antoine Arnault, directeur de l'image du groupe et premier des fils Arnault, semble de plus en plus peiner a mettre les dissensions familiales sous le tapis. 11 avait deja ete totalement depasse, en fevrier, par la dr6le de sortie mediatique d'Helene Mercier-Arnault.

Cette operation avait permis a la pianiste de donner sa version de la situation familiale, en plus de faire la promotion de son dernier disque. Elle avait ete organisee dans le dos du groupe par Louis Jublin, le nouvel impresario personnel de la femme de Bernard Arnault (LL du 24/02/26 et du 27/02/26). En pleine crise de com', Jean-Charles Trehan et la directrice de la communication de LVMH, Helene Freyss, ont poliment garde le silence, alors que politiques et humoristes se sont vite empares des remarques de la premiere dame du luxe franr;ais sur les taxes et les depenses publiques, puis sur les SDF une fois les differents rushs de RTL divulgues par Le Canard enchaine, Mediapart et Blast.

Les services de communication ne sont d'ailleurs pas les seuls a etre a cran. La directrice financiere, Cecile Cabanis, doit, elle aussi, repondre a de plus en plus de questions de la part des investisseurs et des analystes sur l'age du PDG et ses choix de succession. Avec le directeur general delegue de LVMH, Stephane Bianchi, elle se prepare a une assemblee generale durant laquelle ce sujet pourrait etre aborde, tandis que les resultats du premier trimestre, qui seront annonces le 13 avril, ne devraient pas etre a meme de rassurer les petits porteurs.

• Sens. Mark Warner, D-Va., and Adam Schiff, D-Calif., are probing potential insider trading in government, sending a letter to the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Defense Department inspector general.
• The senators cited public reporting of “large positions in equities and equity-linked derivatives” being built up before major policy announcements, such as the Iran war and President Donald Trump’s tariffs agenda.
• The lawmakers also cited a recent report that a broker tied to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth sought to make a multimillion-dollar investment in a defense-linked ETF weeks before the Iran war.

Sens. Mark Warner, D-Va., and Adam Schiff, D-Calif., demanded answers on potential insider trading in government in a letter sent Thursday to the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Defense inspector general.

The senators cited public reporting of “large positions in equities and equity-linked derivatives” being built up before major policy announcements, such as decisions related to the Iran war and President Donald Trump’s tariffs agenda. And they suggested those instances indicate “federal officials are disclosing material nonpublic information for financial gain.”

“Recent reports of equity trading that occurred shortly before significant government policy announcements suggest that federal officials are disclosing material nonpublic information for financial gain,” the lawmakers wrote in the letter to SEC Chair Paul Atkins and Pentagon IG Platte Moring. “These actions undermine public interest and market integrity, and demand oversight by each of your respective authorities, as well as by Congress.”

The letter comes after a slew of reporting that positions have been built up ahead of major policy announcements, which could yield a large benefit afterward. Prediction markets have caught similar heat recently, and the Financial Times reported that a broker associated with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth looked to make a multimillion-dollar buy into a defense-related fund before the White House began the war against Iran.

Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Schiff said the “possibility that someone connected to the Secretary of Defense may have been attempting to trade on material non-public information is highly concerning, and presents serious implications for U.S. national security.”

They said the “appearance that material nonpublic information may be unevenly distributed in advance of government announcements risks undermining investor confidence and the integrity of U.S. capital markets.”

Warner and Schiff asked Atkins and Moring to answer a series of questions, including whether their agencies intend to review the trading activity; what tools their agencies use to detect suspicious trading; whether there are gaps in their agencies’ monitoring; and the safeguards and enforcement measures both agencies have to prevent the unauthorized dissemination of nonpublic information and to prevent federal officials from using nonpublic information for personal gain.

“At a time of heightened market sensitivity to policy developments, it is critical that all market participants operate on a level playing field,” they wrote.

“The DoD OIG is reviewing the letter and we have no further comment at this time,” Defense Department inspector general’s office spokeswoman Mollie Halpern said.

The SEC declined to comment on the letter.

La Lettre — 3 avril 2026 | Résumé bilingue

🇫🇷 FRANÇAIS

Élysée — Dircab sur le départ Georges-François Leclerc, directeur de cabinet d'Emmanuel Macron nommé il y a moins de six mois, serait déjà sur le départ. Sa réputation de manager difficile et ses frictions avec le ministre de l'intérieur Laurent Nuñez accélèrent la séquence. Son départ pourrait coïncider avec celui du secrétaire général Emmanuel Moulin, candidat déclaré à la gouvernance de la Banque de France. Son successeur au poste de chef de cabinet est Laurent Carrié, conseiller territoires promu en interne.

Pacte migration — Équation parlementaire impossible Laurent Nuñez, confronté à la transposition du Pacte européen sur la migration et l'asile d'ici le 12-24 juin 2026, n'entrevoit aucune majorité à l'Assemblée nationale. Il explore la voie des ordonnances, un projet de loi d'habilitation ayant été soumis au Conseil d'État. L'Ofpra a rendu 156 590 décisions en 2025 (+10,3%), un record. Les tribunaux administratifs risquent d'être submergés.

Métropoles — La bataille post-municipales La poussée de la droite et de l'extrême droite recompose les exécutifs métropolitains. Thomas Cazenave (Renaissance) à Bordeaux Métropole, Stéphane Roudaut (LR) à Brest, Éric Ciotti à Nice Côte d'Azur. À Strasbourg, Catherine Trautmann cherche un accord avec les centristes. À Marseille, Nicolas Isnard (LR) prendra la présidence. Plusieurs métropoles de gauche survivent via des accords locaux contraints.

Élysée — Un déontologue enfin nommé Après deux ans de résistance, l'Élysée s'est doté d'un référent déontologue en décembre 2025 : Yannick Desbois, directeur adjoint de cabinet et militaire de carrière, nommé discrètement par Emmanuel Moulin pour trois ans. La fonction, prévue par la loi, avait été réclamée depuis 2021 par l'Observatoire de l'éthique publique.

LVMH — Com' sous pression Le groupe fait face à une avalanche d'enquêtes journalistiques à venir : un livre en anglais signé par deux journalistes du WSJ (Nick Kostov & Stacy Meichtry, St Martin's Press), une série du Monde en six épisodes, une enquête dans L'Express, et une autre dans Le Nouvel Obs. La sortie médiatique incontrôlée d'Hélène Mercier-Arnault en février a déjà fragilisé Jean-Charles Tréhan. La directrice financière Cécile Cabanis est soumise à pression croissante sur la succession de Bernard Arnault. Les résultats du T1 attendus le 13 avril ne devraient pas rassurer.

EDF — Cordemais : fermeture anticipée EDF envisage d'arrêter la tranche 4 de Cordemais avant fin 2026, soit 15 mois avant l'échéance officielle du 31 mars 2027, pour économiser 2-4 M€ de fiscalité. La France est en surcapacité électrique selon RTE. Le personnel est en grève depuis deux mois. Framatome étudie une reconversion industrielle (usine de tuyauteries nucléaires, ~200 emplois, opérationnelle fin 2028).

Accenture — Troisième candidat pour la direction France Cédric Vatier, patron de la division Strategy & Consulting Europe, serait favori pour succéder à Koen Deryckere à la tête d'Accenture Gallia (France, Pays-Bas, Belgique, Luxembourg). Il devance Stéphanie Jandard et Khalid Lahraoui. La succession reste interne.

🇬🇧 ENGLISH

Élysée — Chief of Staff on his way out Georges-François Leclerc, appointed Macron's chief of staff less than six months ago, is reportedly already being eased out. His reputation as a difficult manager and his clashes with Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez have accelerated the process. His departure is expected to coincide with that of Secretary-General Emmanuel Moulin, who is angling for the governorship of the Banque de France. Territorial adviser Laurent Carrié has been promoted internally as replacement chief of staff.

Migration Pact — A parliamentary impossibility Interior Minister Nuñez faces a near-impossible task transposing the EU Migration and Asylum Pact before the June 12-24, 2026 deadline, with no parliamentary majority in sight. The government is exploring the ordinance route, with an enabling bill already submitted to the Conseil d'État. The OFPRA processed a record 156,590 decisions in 2025 (+10.3%). Administrative courts risk being overwhelmed.

Metropoles — Post-municipal battle The right and far-right surge at the municipal elections is reshaping metropolitan governance across France. Thomas Cazenave (Renaissance) heads to Bordeaux Métropole, Stéphane Roudaut (LR) to Brest, and Éric Ciotti to Nice. In Strasbourg, Catherine Trautmann is seeking centrist alliances. In Marseille, LR's Nicolas Isnard takes the presidency. Several left-leaning metropoles survive only via constrained local deals.

Élysée — Ethics officer finally appointed After two years of resistance, the Élysée quietly appointed an ethics officer in December 2025: Yannick Desbois, deputy chief of staff and career military officer, named by Secretary-General Moulin for a three-year renewable term. The role, legally mandated, had been demanded since 2021 by the Public Ethics Observatory.

LVMH — Communications under siege The group faces a wave of upcoming investigative journalism: an English-language book by two WSJ reporters (Nick Kostov & Stacy Meichtry, St Martin's Press), a six-part Le Monde series, and pieces in L'Express and Le Nouvel Obs. The uncontrolled media appearance by Hélène Mercier-Arnault in February already blindsided PR chief Jean-Charles Tréhan. CFO Cécile Cabanis faces mounting investor pressure on succession. Q1 results due April 13 are unlikely to reassure.

EDF — Cordemais: early closure EDF is moving to shut down Cordemais unit 4 before end-2026, 15 months ahead of the official March 2027 deadline, saving an estimated €2-4M in taxes. France is currently in electricity surplus according to RTE. Staff have been on strike for nearly two months. Framatome is studying an industrial conversion of the site (nuclear piping plant, ~200 jobs, operational by end-2028).

Accenture — Third candidate for French CEO Cédric Vatier, head of Accenture's Strategy & Consulting division for Europe, is reportedly the frontrunner to succeed Koen Deryckere as head of Accenture Gallia (France, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg). He leads over Stéphanie Jandard and Khalid Lahraoui. The succession will be internal.