This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on March 13th, 2026. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.
Billions are flowing into the Swedish AI successes Lovable and Legora. Everything seems to be pointing upward. But major risks are now emerging — and they do not come from the competition, but from a considerably closer and more sensitive direction.
In the Apple world, it is called being “sherlocked.”
The name comes from the search service “Sherlock,” whose new version Apple launched in 2002. In doing so, the privately developed search tool “Watson” — which had been created precisely as a complement to Sherlock — was rendered completely pointless.
Apple had suddenly replicated everything Watson did.
The phenomenon keeps happening. In recent days it emerged that an American company plans to spend 26 billion dollars over the next five years building new AI models. Despite the scale of the investment, it seems to have gone somewhat under the radar.
So who is this player trying to challenge giants like OpenAI and Anthropic?
It is Nvidia. The company that has supplied chips to all the world’s AI giants may now be about to compete with them.
Having to fight against one’s own partner is something many companies know well — including in Sweden.
Last year, part of Swedish Truecaller’s service was sherlocked when Apple launched a way to filter out calls from unknown numbers. Since Apple owns the hardware, they can easily see which functions are popular, and from that assess whether it is worth doing the same thing themselves.
It is a brutal asymmetry. Truecaller needs Apple to reach all iPhone users. Apple does not need Truecaller at all.
It is with these glasses on that one should read the good news from the Swedish AI companies Lovable and Legora.
Lovable reports that it has grown its revenues to 400 million dollars per year, and Legora is raising new billions in venture capital at a valuation of around 51 billion kronor. They have an enormous tailwind. Legora’s CEO Max Junestrand stated that they had not yet managed to spend the venture capital from their previous funding round, but that it was a good moment to continue building their cash reserve. Fair enough. Helping lawyers become faster and better with AI is a large market that may well require a great deal of money.
Junestrand is most likely focused primarily on beating Harvey — the American equivalent of Legora. They are even better financed and are operating on home turf in the biggest market in the US. Both are trying to be first to sell themselves to law firms as lawyers’ best AI companion. But could there be a considerably larger threat much closer to home?
Lovable is an even clearer example. They help customers build digital projects of various kinds. It is called “vibe coding.” It sounds good and is presented rather like an entirely new behaviour — and a virgin market. Lovable is at the forefront of this trend.
But it is not quite that simple. At both Legora and Lovable, it is AI models from other companies that do the really substantial work in the background. Lovable’s customers often use Anthropic’s AI model Claude, which in turn uses Nvidia’s chips. The value chain is therefore complex. And it becomes more precarious when players early in the chain decide to make a move.
The AI model Claude has a mode called Claude Cowork. There, just like with Lovable, you can build technical projects without needing to understand the code yourself. And if you want help with a legal agreement, you can go directly to Claude or ChatGPT and ask for yourself.
Claude and the Swedish AI companies are of course not identical products. But the similarities are many, for understandable reasons. At the core, it is the same service performing a large part of the work.
The challenge for AI companies that have built a large part of their business on top of others’ services is therefore to build a sufficiently good service — but one different enough from what their own suppliers might themselves be inclined to build.
And to ensure that those same suppliers do not simply switch off the functionality one depends on. Anthropic — the owner of Claude — switched off the possibility for competitor xAI to use their service.
It might sound unlikely that this could happen to Lovable and Legora — but it is not unthinkable.
As the Apple examples show, things can move fast when your best partner pivots to become your worst competitor. Right now, Anthropic and OpenAI are experiencing exactly this themselves with their own supplier Nvidia. The method is therefore well established.
What sounds like an implausible side project from an important partner can quickly become existential. And the list of companies that have disappeared in this way is long — and the last name on it has not yet been written.
The Swedish AI companies — with all their new billions — would do well to keep this in mind.
