Bill Ready is right. The Napster phase of AI needs to end. I should know. I run Napster.
In his Fortune op-ed, Ready used our name as shorthand for an era when technology outpaced ethics—when access was prioritized over compensation, and creators got left behind. He’s not wrong about the parallel. Generative AI companies have been scraping the internet’s creative output to train models without much thought about who made that content or whether they’d like to be paid for it. That’s a familiar story to us.
But here’s what Ready doesn’t seem to know: Napster isn’t a cautionary tale anymore. We’re an AI company. And we’ve spent a quarter-century learning exactly the lesson he’s describing.
What the Original Napster Actually Revealed
In 1999, Napster didn’t fail because the idea was wrong. It failed because the business model didn’t exist yet.
The insight was correct: People wanted instant, universal access to music. They wanted to discover new artists without buying a full album. They wanted their library in their pocket. Every single one of those desires turned out to be true—Spotify, Apple Music, and the entire streaming economy proved it.
The failure was that Napster moved faster than anyone could figure out how to compensate the people who made the music. That’s the part that took another decade to solve.
AI is in that same window right now. The technology works. The demand is real. But the compensation models are still catching up. Ready is correct to call that out.
What Napster Is Building Now
In 1999, we democratized access to music. In 2026, we’re democratizing access to expertise.
That’s the mission that guides every product decision we make.
Today’s Napster builds AI agents that let real humans with real knowledge share what they know with everyone, at unprecedented scale. We call those agents Companions. They’re not generic chatbots pulling from the entire internet. They’re built on verified, specific expertise that users can collaborate with. And the people who create them own them and get paid when they’re used.
That’s the difference between the Napster phase and what comes after. Not whether knowledge gets shared widely, but whether the people who created it benefit. Our belief is that consumers come first, both in terms of why we build AI technology and what they create with it.
I want to agree with Ready on something else, too. He argues that the AI conversation has been too focused on who’s building the biggest proprietary models, and not enough on open source and democratized access. That’s spot-on. Pinterest reportedly achieved performance comparable to proprietary models at 90% less cost by using open-source tools. That’s the future: democratized AI systems allowing a wide swath of industries and people to perform better, freeing up time for creativity and growth.
The next generation of transformative companies won’t be built by whoever has the most GPUs. They’ll be built by entrepreneurs and educators and small businesses who have domain expertise and finally have tools powerful enough to do something with it – and monetize it.
That’s what we’re trying to enable. AI is a fantastic collaborator and catalyst for creativity, but ideas are the domain of humankind. We need to preserve the human origins of innovation rather than trying to commoditize it through the use of AI.
How the Napster Phase Ends
Ready invokes our name as a warning. I’d rather it be understood as a lesson that we’ve already internalized.
The music industry eventually found its model. Artists get royalties. Streaming services pay licensing fees. It’s not perfect, but it’s a functioning economy where creators participate in the value they generate. That evolution happened because Napster forced the conversation more than 25 years ago. The same thing needs to happen in AI. And we’re not waiting around for someone else to figure it out.
So yes, Bill: The Napster phase of AI needs to end. We agree. We’re working on it. And unlike last time, we’re building the part where creators get paid from the start.
Everyone else needs to find a way to build that, too.
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Credit: Source link
