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The extent of AI’s economic impact is still up for debate while some are already pondering solutions to worst-case scenarios

The ripple effects of artificial intelligence on the economy are only expected to intensify, from job displacement to a shift in GDP from labor to capital. The unknowns are prompting some to revisit an old idea with a fresh face: a tax on AI processing, aka “compute.”

Sound familiar? Bill Gates proposed the idea of a “robot tax” back in 2017—well before ChatGPT and Claude Code were household names.

“Half a year ago, it was something you would hear about only in very select circles,” says Anton Korinek, an economics professor currently on leave from the University of Virginia Darden School of Business. “It really has become much more mainstream in the last three months.”

Advocates support an AI tax to make up for potentially massive job loss and to slow AI’s extreme growth rate.

“We’re at a point now where we need to try and preserve jobs,” says Andrew Yang, a former presidential candidate and a co-chair of the Forward Party. “AI is going to gut white-collar employment and then by the way, it’s going to proceed to truck driving and a lot of other very common jobs.” Yang has long supported a so-called universal basic income.

“If you look at the taxes that are being paid by the biggest AI companies, they’re nowhere near commensurate to the value that AI is going to end up both generating and soaking up,” he adds.

Last month, Texas billionaire John Arnold, who co-chairs the philanthropic organization Arnold Ventures, floated the compute-tax idea on X.

“Only way to limit coming AI backlash is to start shifting taxes from labor to compute,” he wrote. “The average voter needs to see salient benefits from AI.” (Arnold wasn’t available to comment.)

In 2021, Sam Altman wrote, “We need to design a system that embraces this technological future and taxes the assets that will make up most of the value in that world—companies and land—in order to fairly distribute some of the coming wealth.”

The OpenAI chief recently told The Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson that “I no longer believe in universal basic income as much as I once did.”

Economists predict that the debate will only grow ahead of the next election season. With conversations already bubbling up in response to public sentiment about AI and doom and gloom predictions abounding, here’s what to know.

Generally there are two reasons to tax something, says Korinek: raising money and reducing the use of something by making it more expensive. A compute tax could bring revenue from AI’s success or slow its possible disruption. “You hear people in both camps of debate,” he says.

Many people are concerned about massive job loss as a result of AI, the concentration of the market, AI’s consumption of resources, and the community impact of expanding data centers. Some see taxation as a way to offset the loss of labor taxes to fund social services.

Yang advocates spreading the newly generated wealth around.

“If I were to generate even tens of billions of dollars in new tax revenue and it just went into the federal government and no one saw a dime of that, it wouldn’t actually make people feel any better about it,” he says.

Others want to put the brakes on AI, on account of safety concerns and perceived existential risks. In this argument, the compute tax would be akin to a pollution tax.

In one scenario, companies that operate data centers would be taxed. In another, corporations and other users would be taxed on their consumption of tokens, AI’s key unit of measurement.

“If you had a tax on electricity, you would tax those companies that are distributing electricity, or you could tax the users of electricity,” says Pascual Restrepo, an associate professor of economics at Yale University.

Whether the Amazons and Microsofts are taxed at the front end, or the businesses and customers on the receiving end have to pay, the cost of using AI would go up, he says.

A compute tax is a sensible policy lever to consider in order to slow down automation, says Simon Johnson, a Nobel laureate and professor of entrepreneurship at the MIT Sloan School of Management. The tax could make it less appealing to fire tens of thousands of workers and build data centers, he adds. As AI advances, there should also be new things for humans to do.

“You want to create new tasks, you want to boost the demand for labor and that’s where the tech sector is kind of falling down,” he says.

Korinek, the UVA professor, says that for now the amount spent on AI computation isn’t so big that a tax on it would provide a windfall. “It would raise a little bit of money but it would not really make a significant impact,” he says.

Restrepo notes that in addition to automating office work, the technology is already being used in drug discovery, weather forecasting, epidemiological models, fraud detection and many other important initiatives.

“Why do you want to increase the cost of all of that?” he says. Taxing compute could also just wind up pushing the U.S. industry abroad. “If you ask economists, most of them think this is unnecessary or too blunt,” he adds.

Given that AI is expected to transform society, many economists believe policy changes make sense. But some propose issue-focused solutions rather than a blanket tax. Restrepo says the U.S. already has a rich tax system that can tax corporate income, which might suffice even as AI progresses.

For AI safety issues, regulations might be better than taxes. And with labor, other policies could be adjusted, says Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab.

In the current U.S. tax structure, a company with 1,000 workers pays more total taxes, including payroll taxes, than a company that makes the same amount of money using 1,000 machines, he says.

“We’re discouraging you from doing the one that amplifies humans and encouraging the one that replaces humans,” says
Brynjolfsson. “I don’t know if that was the intent, but that’s the effect.”

While a realignment of labor and capital taxes could help, he says, the broader solution is for AI to augment work instead of replacing it, and for the labor market to become more dynamic with portable benefits and job retraining.

“The compute tax kind of takes aim at the wrong thing,” says Brynjolfsson.

The pharma giant has agreed to pay $750 million upfront, with up to $300 million in additional payments subject to targets

Roche Holding ROP 1.07%increase; green up pointing triangle said it agreed to buy PathAI for up to $1.05 billion in a deal that seeks to bolster the artificial-intelligence offerings of its diagnostics division.

The Swiss pharmaceutical group said Thursday that the acquisition of U.S.-based PathAI would build on a partnership between the two companies formed in 2021 and take in-house an AI platform that aims to facilitate diagnostic workflows and help accelerate clinical-therapy development.

Under the deal, Roche agreed to pay $750 million upfront, with up to $300 million in additional payments subject to targets, it said. The deal is expected to close in the second half of the year.

Roche said that it intends to scale globally PathAI’s technology for pathology laboratories and the biopharma industry. The company expects to combine PathAI’s offerings with its own in order to drive laboratory efficiency and foster the discovery of potential drug targets and new diagnostic tools.

Once limited to fast fashion, TikTok shopping hauls featuring designer brands signal a return to conspicuous consumerism

When Matthieu Blazy’s first collection as Chanel creative director arrived in stores this spring, it sparked mild fashion hysteria worldwide. Chanel enthusiasts and first-time shoppers alike waited for hours in line to get a hold of viral $1,600 slingbacks and $11,000 totes. Soon, posts of content creators holding up black shopping bags adorned with the brand’s white camellia and videos titled “Chanel unboxing” or “Chanel haul” were flooding TikTok and Instagram.

Social media hauls are nothing new; many of us are familiar with the “unboxing” genre. A creator will sit in front of their camera, holding shopping bags or boxes and film their live reaction while opening purchases. Historically, content creators showed off mostly fast fashion from labels such as Shein and Zara. Lately, however, millions of clicks are being generated by vast baskets of products from some of the most expensive labels money can buy, such as Chanel, Hermès, Miu Miu and The Row.

After the post-pandemic years and the dominance of “quiet luxury”, the fashion pendulum appears to have swung; conspicuous consumerism is back in style. Trend forecaster Sean Monahan has described a new aesthetic that reflects the change of administration in the US and an increasingly uncertain economy.

Sartorially inspired by the 1980s, the decade of status and excess, he called it the “boom boom” aesthetic — or dressing for the income you want rather than the one you necessarily have. That mentality is translating into some consumers’ shopping habits and these extravagant hauls. Some 66 per cent of Gen Zs agree that their generation is more concerned with “looking rich” than previous generations, according to data from youth culture agency Archrival.

“If we were to go back a decade or two and somebody bought that much stuff in one go and poured it out on the floor in front of you, you’d be shocked,” says fashion psychologist Dion Terrelonge. Such hauls contribute to a “more-is-more” mentality becoming the new norm. “We didn’t really have haul culture before social media. In order to show off all the goods you bought, you had to invite friends around or visibly walk around in different outfits.”

Against the backdrop of a global cost-of-living crisis is an enduring fascination with the aesthetics, influence and shopping habits of the super-rich. #RichTok creators are a social media subset made up of the 0.01 per cent who unapologetically show off their eye-boggling wealth. Becca Bloom, 27, gained notoriety online last year for posting videos surrounded by dozens of Hermès orange boxes. “Self-made” billionaire Kylie Jenner, 28, also recently sparked headlines by posing in front of a wall of her Hermès bags.

Exclusivity and scarcity have long been the modus operandi of the luxury market. Now, in a saturated, ultra-fast-paced media environment and amid a luxury sector slump, the optics of excess are going viral and influencing some consumer behaviour.

When the Chanel collection debuted in Singapore, Debra JaneToh, a 34-year-old brand manager, walked away with two bags, the Preppy Coco and Cerf tote. She later went back and purchased two more Preppy Coco styles. Toh then filmed an unboxing on TikTok to show off her purchases. “I knew that such content would perform well,” she says.

In fact, unboxing and hauls are catnip for social media followers. From 2023 to 2025, haul and unboxing content grew 22 per cent on social media, according to Traackr data. In 2025, hauls and unboxings outperformed “Get Ready With Me”s (GRWMs), another popular influencer trope, by 1.7 times, with creators leaning into the format for stronger engagement on their videos. On TikTok, #haul has more than 19mn posts.

Toh wouldn’t purchase more than two or three luxury bags in a year, but “the new [Chanel] collection was just such a big moment in fashion,” she says. One of her videos describes the shopping experience as “the Chanel hunger games”. Toh is happy with all her purchases and has no regrets, but she admits that “hype definitely played into it”.

Whether it is for purchase inspiration or entertainment value, there is something hypnotic about watching someone unbox a single shopping spree that would cost an average person’s yearly salary. Videos of influencers bringing their viewers along to “leather appointments” or designer sample sales are ubiquitous online and tap into the growing content genre of “shoppertainment”.

“It’s fast-paced. There are reveals. It’s engaging,” says Terrelonge of the content. “What it produces then are dopamine-driven entertainment loops that keep us hooked.”

Since 2020, searches for shopping addiction have doubled. As one TikTok video reasonably asked: ‘Where’s everyone getting the Chanel money from?’

And when shopping is entertainment and owning the item of the moment brings much-needed social media exposure in the attention economy, many will stretch themselves beyond their means to buy in.

“In some ways, the haul is the purchase motivation,” says Ben Harms, chief growth officer at Archrival. “The video matters more than the product.”

Ironically, as luxury shopping hauls proliferate online, the luxury industry as a whole is facing a significant slowdown, driven by price rise fatigue and shoppers’ disillusionment with luxury’s promise of quality. Seeing luxury items consumed with such voracity online can prompt unfavourable comparisons with high street and fast-fashion brands, weakening an already fragile value proposition.

Every unboxing of the same pair of pony-hair ballet flats also treads the fine line of brand overexposure. Charlotte Bickley, 31, a content creator based in New York and editor-at-large for the Daily Front Row, has also previously documented her Chanel finds on TikTok. When it came to Chanel’s new collection, however, she didn’t buy into the online hype. “When you see something in mass all over the internet, it becomes less interesting,” she says.

The disconnect between the spending power we want (the one consumed through screens) and the one that most of us have can feel jarring. Between the rising cost of living and stagnant wage growth, the widening gap between the have and the have-nots is growing. All this economic instability is precisely where the “boom-boom” mentality thrives — a feeling of placing another online order as the world burns around you.

And while for some it is obvious that what is shown on social media is not always real — “It’s not real life,” says Toh — others are dangerously sliding into overspending. “Luxury hauls raise the baseline of what counts as normal,” says Terrelonge.

Searches for shopping addiction have doubled since 2020, reaching an all-time high in early 2026, according to Google Trends. Americans also owed $1.28tn on their credit cards at the end of the last quarter of 2025, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. “Where’s everyone getting Chanel money from?” one viral TikTok video reasonably asked amid the online frenzy.

It’s not just fashion that is feeling superficial. In an ever more volatile world, such brazen — even reckless — displays of excess could reflect a wider sense of deep social disorder.

“Everything feels vaporous. Everything feels here today, gone tomorrow, whether that’s jobs, technology, everything,” says Harms. “There’s just so much that feels an inch deep and a mile wide.”

Rising cost of kerosene is ‘normal part of airline business’, says document

Airlines must continue to reimburse passengers for flight cancellations caused by high energy prices, the EU’s transport chief has warned, rejecting claims of jet fuel shortages in Europe.

EU transport commissioner Apostolos Tzitzikostas told the FT that cancellations driven by fuel prices were not considered extraordinary circumstances, meaning airlines must still compensate passengers. He said the rising cost of kerosene was part of doing business in this sector.

The Greek commissioner also claimed Europe “can sustain jet fuel supplies for a long period”, despite warnings from the International Energy Agency and fellow EU commissioners that airlines would soon run out of kerosene.

“The price of jet fuel is the reason why we have cancellations of flights and if they cancel flights without extraordinary circumstances — jet fuel prices are not extraordinary circumstances — they will have to reimburse the people,” he said.

Airlines were cancelling flights that “didn’t make much financial sense and now with the doubling of the prices, they make absolutely no sense for the companies”, Tzitzikostas added.

Several airlines have cut 2mn seats from their May schedule within the past two weeks. IEA director Fatih Birol last month warned the continent had just six weeks of supplies left and EU energy commissioner Dan Jørgensen also raised concerns about a supply crisis.

Tzitzikostas admitted the “situation is tight” and stressed he was not living “on another planet” but argued that EU rules were flexible enough for the current predicament.

Brussels would only consider changing them if the situation seriously deteriorated, Tzitzikostas said, without spelling out exactly how much worse the crisis would have to get for that to happen.

The commissioner, who also oversees the EU tourism portfolio, urged caution over alarmist messaging: “We have a tourist season ahead of us. We need to be careful with words we use and avoid causing panic.”

To address industry concerns, the European Commission will set out new guidelines this week for airlines and passengers in the wake of the Middle East war.

The draft guidelines seen by the FT clarify existing rules rather than make new concessions to alleviate the industry’s woes.

“Managing the risk of high fuel costs is a normal part of an airline’s business,” reads the document, which remains subject to change.

Tzitzikostas said that Europe still had emergency stocks and had set up means to more closely monitor jet fuel supplies and co-ordinate between member states to release them “in an orderly manner” if needed.

Airlines will be reminded that they can use Jet A, a fuel predominantly used in the US, in efforts to reduce reliance on fuel coming from the Gulf.

Requirements for airlines to use their allocated take-off and landing slots will be maintained, which means operators that cancel flights due to high prices risk losing their slots.

The EU transport commissioner, who hails from the tourism hub of Thessaloniki, said he expected the impact on tourism in Europe would be limited.

While the number of travellers coming from the Middle East, or travelling to Europe via the Middle East, was declining, Tzitzikostas said intra-European tourism would compensate for this loss from other parts of the world.

“Some countries could not be hit at all,” he said, pointing in particular to “European southern countries who have this product that many people are looking for in the summer”.

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FTSE 100 testing company said two previous bids by Swedish private equity group had undervalued its business

FTSE 100 testing company Intertek is gearing up to reject EQT’s latest takeover offer, after the Swedish private equity group this week raised its bid in pursuit of a deal.

Intertek considers that EQT’s sweetened £58-per-share offer lodged on Tuesday still undervalues the company, said people familiar with the matter. While the board is likely to reject the bid as early as this week, no final decision has been made.

EQT’s latest offer is closer to a price that would be acceptable for Intertek, the people added, raising the possibility that the UK testing and inspection company could be acquired in a more than £10bn deal if the buyout group sweetens its offer again.

Intertek and EQT declined to comment.

Intertek previously rejected EQT’s bids of £51.50 and £54 per share last month, saying they “fundamentally” undervalued the group.

This week EQT submitted its third £58 per share indicative proposal, equivalent to an equity value of £8.9bn or £10.3bn including debt.

EQT said it “has submitted this significantly higher [proposal] with a view to securing prompt and constructive engagement from the board of Intertek and progressing swiftly towards a transaction”.

Intertek on Tuesday said it would review the latest proposal and respond in “due course”.

The new offer represents a 54 per cent premium to Intertek’s closing price of £37.70 on April 9, the day before EQT put in its first proposal.

Shares in Intertek closed up slightly at £51.06 on Wednesday, well below the Swedish group’s latest offer.

EQT submitted its first nonbinding takeover offer for Intertek on April 10, which the testing company rejected. Intertek within days announced plans for a strategic review to explore separating out its energy and infrastructure business, either through a sale or demerger.

Matt Peltz, the son of activist investor Nelson Peltz, has built a stake in Intertek and has pushed for a potential break-up, the FT reported last month.

Under UK takeover regulations, EQT has until May 14 to make a firm offer or walk away.