Topic file
When software adds a new priority and asks the customer to absorb the cost.
AI enshittification happens when platforms force assistants, summaries or automation into products without preserving the simpler tool customers chose. The cost can appear as higher prices, weaker provenance, more data collection or another dependency that is difficult to remove.
These case files examine Copilot bundling, AI search attribution, software interoperability, cloud lock-in and the power platforms gain when their preferred feature becomes the default.
A useful test is whether the original job remains available: can you switch off the assistant, identify the source of an answer, export your work and change providers without rebuilding the workflow? Record the default setting and any price difference before judging a new feature by its launch promise.
Search began as a concise route to other sites. Its current incentives include advertising, proprietary answer surfaces and AI features that can reduce the reason to continue to the source.
The European Commission has designated ChatGPT, Reddit and Roblox as very large services under the Digital Services Act, bringing new risk, transparency and user-choice obligations.
Microsoft’s AI-everywhere strategy gave its own customers a new word for software decay. The nickname is crude. The product lesson is not.
The UK’s competition regulator has required Google to give publishers ways to opt out of AI-search uses and to properly attribute publisher content in AI-generated results.
The UK Competition and Markets Authority is investigating whether Microsoft’s business-software ecosystem has strategic market status, including whether bundling, defaults and interoperability limit customer choice.
As enterprise AI vendors move from fixed plans to usage-based pricing, switching models can mean rewriting prompts, workflows and budgets at the same time.
GitHub publishes DMCA notices and says Copilot’s training on public repositories is lawful. Developers still have to ask who gets attribution when an assistant reproduces familiar code.
The UK Competition and Markets Authority identified data-egress fees and interoperability barriers that make cloud switching and multi-cloud use harder, prompting commitments from Amazon and Microsoft.
Microsoft’s SSMS integration promises an assistant inside a serious database tool. The official docs also read like a map of the setup, authentication and context failures users have to debug first.
As ChatGPT moved toward advertising in 2026, the promise of a neutral assistant collided with the oldest platform incentive: turn attention into inventory.