More and more tech CEOs are beginning to believe that we are already in the singularity.
Patrick Collison, co-founder and CEO of payments giant Stripe, is the latest to weigh in — and he’s doing so not with philosophical speculation, but with hard transaction data. In a recent interview on TBPN, Collison made a striking claim: that the first quarter of 2026 may one day be remembered as the moment the singularity actually began. What makes his perspective uniquely compelling is that it’s grounded in real purchasing behavior across millions of businesses on Stripe’s platform, rather than abstract theorizing about AI capabilities.
“This is very arbitrary, obviously, but I feel like there’s at least a reasonable chance that 2026 Q1 will be looked back upon as the first quarter of the singularity,” Collison said. “Maybe in three years, in hindsight, that will look completely delusional. I don’t know.”
Collison pointed to a notable shift in the data when examining Stripe’s user cohorts. “There’s kind of the macroscopic picture — the Stripe user base and things overall looking pretty good and so forth. But when we look at the cohorts, when we look at the businesses that signed up in 2023 and their progression and trajectory over the subsequent months, the businesses that signed up in 2024, and then the businesses that signed up in 2025 — there’s been a phase transition in 2025 where there are both more of them and, on a per-business basis, they are on average doing better.”
He was quick to acknowledge the skepticism such a claim invites. “You might think, okay, well there’s this cavalcade of new lightweight vibe-coded applications or something, but there’s not really a lot of substance there. We’re actually seeing both numbers move together. There are many more businesses getting started, and the average median business is in fact performing better.”
Looking ahead, Collison’s read on 2026 is even more bullish. “We’re only a couple of weeks into 2026, but it looks tentatively like 2026 may plausibly be an acceleration, even over that significant leap of 2025.”
He also addressed the broader question of AI’s translation into economic reality — something that has long been debated. “We’ve had all sorts of dramatic AI inventions and innovations over the last couple of years. There’s a bit of a question of: how and when should we think about how it’ll translate to the economy? I would say, looking at real purchasing behavior on Stripe, 2025 — end of 2025, beginning of 2026 — is when I feel like we’re really starting to see it.”
Collison’s comments arrive at a moment when the singularity is becoming an increasingly common reference point among tech’s most prominent figures. Sam Altman hinted at it as early as January 2025, posting a cryptic message suggesting we may already be on the other side of it. Google co-founder Sergey Brin echoed similar sentiments in May 2025. And just weeks ago, Elon Musk declared outright that we have entered the singularity. What distinguishes Collison’s framing, however, is its empirical anchor. While others have pointed to AI capability milestones, Collison is pointing to something more tangible: more businesses forming, and those businesses performing better — simultaneously. If that trend accelerates through 2026 as he expects, the economic case for the singularity may become harder to dismiss.