Source: The Pomp Letter
The practical consolidation of frontier AI development under government influence—through funding, regulatory approval, and national security frameworks—removes the fiction that these are purely private ventures. OpenAI's regulatory entanglement with the U.S. government, Anthropic's dependence on structured compliance regimes, and China's direct integration of labs into state priorities means that AI capability development is increasingly a nationalist project dressed in corporate language. The economic and geopolitical stakes are too high for governments to tolerate private control, so they're absorbing these operations through incentive structures and oversight rather than formal acquisition.