There Is Only One AI Company. Welcome to the Blob
It all started, like many things, with Elon Musk. In the early 2010s, he realized that AI was poised to become perhaps the most powerful technology of all time. But he deeply suspected that if the economy fell under the control of powerful profit-driven forces, humanity would suffer. Musk had been an early investor in DeepMind, the UK-based lab that was ahead of the curve in artificial general intelligence research. After Google bought DeepMind in 2014, Musk severed ties with the research organization. He believed it was essential to create a counterforce motivated by human benefit, not profit. So he helped create OpenAI. When I interviewed Musk and Sam Altman at the company’s inauguration in 2015, they were adamant that shareholder profit would not be a factor in their decisions.
Fast forward to today. OpenAI is worth half a trillion dollars, or perhaps $750 billion, and its for-profit arm has become a public benefit corporation. Musk, the world’s richest human, runs his own for-profit AI company, xAI. So much for the nonprofit labs leading the way. But even the most panicked Cassandra of a decade ago probably didn’t imagine that advanced AI would be controlled by a single nested, money-seeking monster.
This is what we have today. Even more worrying, this interdependent complex is financed in part by foreign powers and supported by the U.S. government, which appears to prioritize security over security. This rococo set of partnerships, mergers, funding agreements, government initiatives and strategic investments binds the fates of virtually every major player in the AI-o-sphere. I call this entity the Blob.
Blob’s Black Box
A full description of the interlocking connections of these entities would take me well beyond my word limit here. Even compiling a simplified list requires the use of – you guessed it – AI. Reader, I admit it. I went to GPT-5 to help me get the complete picture. “My head is spinning,” I wrote, swallowing my pride to ask this smug stochastic parrot for a full list of cloud deals, investments, partnerships, and government agreements. It took two minutes and 35 seconds before the normally quick LLM came back with some answers. “You’re not wrong, it’s dizzying,” said the robot, always courteous. “It’s basically a giant circular machine of money and calculation.” GPT Note: You cannot write the text to display for this essay. Leave it to me to write. Regardless, once it stopped its analyses, GPT-5 began churning out several thousand words, with flowcharts, arrows, and cross-references to dozens of tedious deals like the iconic Stargate initiative that binds OpenAI, Oracle, Nvidia, Softbank, and an Abu Dhabi investment firm, with backing from the U.S. government.
This week provided a more recent example: a complicated deal involving Nvidia, Microsoft and Anthropic. Microsoft’s press release sums it up in three lines, like a mediocre line from Allen Ginsberg: “Anthropic to evolve Claude on Azure / Anthropic to adopt the NVIDIA architecture / NVIDIA and Microsoft to invest in Anthropic.” » The deal has the characteristics of what critics call a circular arrangement, in which money flows between companies before a single customer is involved. Microsoft is investing at least $5 billion in Anthropic, a direct rival to key Microsoft partner OpenAI, and Anthropic has committed to buying $30 billion of Microsoft’s cloud computing. At the same time, Nvidia is investing in Anthropic, which is committed to developing its technology on Nvidia chips. Poof! Nvidia is becoming more involved in its customers’ activities. Microsoft has coverage thanks to its previous reliance on OpenAI. And Anthropic’s valuation climbs to $350 billion. (Just two months ago, it was valued at $183 billion.)
Anthropic did not comment on the deal beyond a press release, pointing reporters to a video in which the three CEOs explain the deal. Hyperscale bosses participate remotely; these deals are so common that it’s apparently not worth getting on a plane to announce them in person. In the video, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella appears in the middle, beaming like the Cheshire Cat as he invokes what could be the Blob’s slogan: “We’re going to be customers of each other more and more.” » As he explains the details, the others nod. At left is Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. Anthropic does not have its own cloud or non-AI revenue streams like Google, Microsoft, or Meta. So it has now added Microsoft to its previous stock-for-compute deals with Amazon and Google. Hat trick!
Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, in his signature leather jacket, calls the deal a “dream come true,” noting that he’s been eyeing Anthropic for some time and is excited to add the company to his extensive book of deals. “We are present in every company in every country,” he says. “Now this partnership between the three of us will be able to bring AI, to bring Claude, to every business, to every industry, everywhere in the world. »
