By Tom Lauricella
Publication Date: 2026-03-09 00:00:00
The headlines have focused on Iran, but there is no doubt that the programmers and computer scientists at Anthropic, OpenAI, Alphabet and numerous other artificial intelligence companies have not left their keyboards over the past week. Before the war began, stocks in one industry after another were plagued by concerns that AI would undermine their business models.
At the beginning of the AI boom, the focus was on the winners among the “pickaxe” companies, such as semiconductor or data center suppliers. But over the last five or six months, attention has shifted to the disruptive power of AI. Investors are particularly focused on how AI will lower barriers to entry across much of the service economy and bridge economic divides between established large and small companies.
Economic moats, which can be thought of as a company’s competitive advantages, are a core element in how Morningstar equity analysts evaluate stocks. Against the background…
