Bill Ready is right. The Napster phase of AI needs to end. I should know. I run Napster.
in his wealth ColumnReady uses our name as shorthand for a time when technology trumps ethics, when access takes precedence over compensation, and creators are left behind. He was not wrong about parallelism. Generative AI companies have been leveraging the creative output of the internet to train models without giving much thought to who produced the content, or whether they were willing to pay for it. This is a familiar story.
But what Ready doesn’t seem to know is this: Napster is no longer a cautionary tale. We are an artificial intelligence company. It has taken us a quarter of a century to learn the lessons he describes.
What the original Napster really revealed
In 1999, Napster failed not because of a wrong idea. It failed because the business model didn’t exist yet.
The insight is correct: People want instant, ubiquitous access to music. They want to discover new artists without buying full albums. They want libraries in their pockets. Each of these wishes proved true—Spotify, apple Music and the entire streaming economy prove this.
The failure was that Napster moved faster than anyone could figure out how to compensate music creators. This was the part that took another decade to sort out.
Artificial intelligence is now in the same window. This technique works. The need is real. But compensation models are still catching up. It’s only right to be prepared to point this out.
What Napster is building now
In 1999, we democratized access to music. By 2026, we will democratize access to expertise.
It’s our mission that guides every product decision we make.
Today’s Napster builds artificial intelligence agents that allow real humans with real knowledge to share what they know with everyone at an unprecedented scale. We call these agents “companions.” They are not generic chatbots taken from the entire internet. They are built on specific proven expertise that users can collaborate with. The people who create them own them and get paid when they use them.
That’s the difference between the Napster phase and the phase after that. no regardless Knowledge is shared widely, but Does the person who created it benefit?. Our belief is that consumers come first, both in the reasons we build AI technology and in the content they create using it.
I agree with Ready on other things as well. He believes the AI conversation is too focused on who is building the largest proprietary models and not enough on open source and democratizing access. That was spot on. interest By using open source tools, performance is reportedly comparable to proprietary models at 90% lower cost. This is the future: democratized AI systems that enable a wide range of industries and people to perform better, freeing up time for creativity and growth.
The next generation of transformative companies won’t be created by the people with the most GPUs. They will be built by entrepreneurs, educators, and small businesses who have domain expertise and ultimately tools powerful enough to do something with it – and monetize it.
That’s what we’re trying to achieve. AI is a great collaborator and catalyst for creativity, but creativity is a human domain. We need to protect the human origins of innovation rather than trying to commoditize it through the use of artificial intelligence.
How the Napster phase ended
Ready calls our name as a warning. I would rather understand it as a lesson that we have internalized.
The music industry finally found its formula. Artists receive royalties. Streaming services pay licensing fees. It’s not perfect, but it’s a well-functioning economy where creators participate in the value they create. This evolution happened because Napster forced this conversation 25 years ago. The same thing needs to happen with artificial intelligence. We won’t wait for others to solve this problem.
So, yes, Bill: the Napster phase of AI needs to end. We agree. We are working on it. Unlike last time, we’re building in a part where creators get paid from the start.
Others need to find a way to achieve this, too.
The views expressed in Fortune opinion pieces are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views and beliefs of: wealth.