Steven Levy argues in Wired that the artificial intelligence industry has evolved into a single interconnected entity—dubbed “the Blob”—through a web of partnerships, investments, and cloud agreements among major players like Nvidia, Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic, despite originally being founded to prevent profit-driven control of AI.
The recent Microsoft-Nvidia-Anthropic deal exemplifies this consolidation: Microsoft commits up to $5 billion to Anthropic (a competitor to its primary partner OpenAI), while Anthropic pledges $30 billion for Microsoft Azure computing power and Nvidia invests up to $10 billion in Anthropic in exchange for using Nvidia hardware—creating what one CEO called “one enormous circular machine for money and computing.”
OpenAI, which was established in 2015 as a nonprofit counterbalance to corporate AI development, now holds a valuation between $500 billion and $750 billion, with the U.S. government endorsing the industry’s consolidation—backed in part by foreign powers including Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi—while antitrust regulators remain largely absent.
Source: https://www.wired.com/story/ai-industry-monopoly-nvidia-microsoft-google/
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