$200,000,000,000 Vaporizes From Google Stock As Apple Begins Exploring AI Search in Safari

Shares in Alphabet Inc. (GOOG) are dipping sharply amid comments from tech giant Apple suggesting that artificial intelligence (AI) will threaten the dominance of the top search engine.

Apple’s services chief Eddie Cue says he believes AI-run search engines will eventually replace the classic search engines like Google, Bloomberg reports .

Speaking in a testimony during the US Justice Department’s lawsuit against Alphabet Inc, Cue said he expects Apple will use services from OpenAI, Perplexity and Anthropic as search options in Apple’s Safari browser in the future.

“Prior to AI, my feeling around this was, none of the others were valid choices… I think today there is much greater potential because there are new entrants attacking the problem in a different way.”

Currently, Google has been paying Apple as much as $20 billion a year to be the default search engine on Apple’s Safari browser.

Following Cue’s testimony and the subsequent uncertainty of Google’s future dominance, the tech giant’s stock collapsed, wiping out over $200 billion in market cap.

At time of writing, GOOG is down 10.4% on the day, currently trading at $149.

Cue added that for AI search engines to improve, they will need better indexing, but even if they can’t achieve that, they will likely soon have features that are “so much better that people will switch.”

Says Cue, referring to the switch from standard to AI-based search engines,

“There’s enough money now, enough large players, that I don’t see how it doesn’t happen.”

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