This one sentence from Apple's top executive wipes away $160 billion from Google’s market value in less than one day

Google-parent company Alphabet’s shares tanked about 8% on Wednesday (May 7), wiping out $160 from the company’s market capitalisation following Apple executive Eddy Cue’s testimony in the ongoing antitrust case against the search giant. Cue revealed that the iPhone maker is “actively looking at” overhauling Safari's search capabilities and that Google searches on Safari experienced their first-ever decline last month.According to a report by The Verge, Apple’s senior vice president attributed the dip to the increasing adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) by users, a technology Apple is now considering incorporating directly into Safari.“That has never happened in 22 years,” the senior vice president of Apple's services division stated during the trial. Not only Google, Apple’s shares also dropped 2% following Cue’s testimony.According to Cue, Apple is also looking to integrate AI-powered search options into its Safari web browser, posing a threat to Google's highly profitable search advertising business. According to Bloomberg, Cue indicated that Apple intends to add AI search providers, including OpenAI and Perplexity AI, as alternative search options within Safari in the future.“We will add them to the list — they probably won’t be the default,” he said. However, he still prefers Google as the default in Safari, saying that he has lost sleep over the possibility of losing the revenue share from their agreement.“I’ve lost a lot of sleep thinking about it,” Cue said, adding that other AI players competing with Google need to improve. He noted that Cue also said that LLMs will continue to improve.Google pays the iPhone maker billions of dollars per year — as much as $20 billion per year back in 2022, according to testimony in the trial — to be the default search engine on iPhones.