The most recent G7 summit included the leaders of seven of the most powerful countries in the world — and executives from OpenAI, Anthropic and DeepMind, who were treated like peers. AI companies might seem like they’re fighting over only product and market share, but they’re playing a much bigger game: This is a struggle for power at the highest levels.
AI companies aren’t shy about the scale of their ambitions. The leading labs all say they are building artificial general intelligence. Even if you don’t think they’ll succeed, their willingness to spend hundreds of billions of dollars in the attempt is telling. The industry’s leaders issue warnings about the dangers of a power-hungry runaway AI that tries to take over the world. Their actions suggest that they understand that motivation extraordinarily well.No company is monopolizing AI yet, but that’s not necessarily reassuring. The valuations on these companies only make sense if one of them ends up a monopoly, and a company that monopolized AI might be the most powerful one in history. If none does, that means they will be competing for power with each other as well as the state. That could make the dynamics more intense, not less.
