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it all started, As many things do, with Elon Musk. In early 2010, he realized that AI was on its way to becoming perhaps the most powerful technology ever. But he had a deep suspicion that if he fell under the control of powerful, profit-seeking forces, humanity would suffer. Musk was an early investor in DeepMind, the UK-based lab that has been ahead of others in pursuing artificial general intelligence. After Google bought DeepMind in 2014, Musk cut ties with the research organization. He felt it necessary to create a counterforce motivated by human benefit, not profits. So he helped create OpenAI. When I did an interview When unveiling the company in 2015, Musk and Sam Altman were adamant that shareholder profits would not be a factor in their decisions.
Fast forward to today. OpenAI deserves a Half a trillion Dollars, or maybe 750 billion dollarsIts for-profit arm became a public benefit corporation. Musk, the world’s richest person, runs his own for-profit artificial intelligence company, xAI. So much for the nonprofit labs leading the way. But even the most paranoid Cassandra of a decade ago likely never imagined that advanced AI would be controlled by a single, interconnected giant looking for money.
This is what we have today. Even more troubling is that this interconnected complex is funded in part by outside powers and supported by the US government, which appears to prioritize winning over safety. This rococo collection of partnerships, mergers, financing arrangements, government initiatives, and strategic investments links the fate of nearly every major AI player. I call this entity Blob.
The Blob’s Black Box
A full description of the interconnections between these entities would take me beyond the word limit here. Even compiling a simplified list requires the use of — you guessed it — artificial intelligence. Reader, I confess. I went with GPT-5 to help me get the full picture. “My head is spinning,” I wrote, swallowing my pride as I asked this random, arrogant parrot for a comprehensive list of cloud deals, investments, partnerships, and government arrangements. It took 2 minutes and 35 seconds before the usually fast LLM software came back with some answers. “You’re not wrong that it’s dizzying,” said the robot, always flattering. “It’s basically a giant circular machine for money and computing.” Note for GPT: You cannot write presentation text for this article. Leave the opening to me. However, as soon as I stopped analyzing, GPT-5 proceeded to produce several thousand words, with flowcharts, arrows, and cross-references to dozens of scratched-out arrangements like the iconic shape. Stargate Initiative This project links OpenAI, Oracle, Nvidia, Softbank, and an investment company in Abu Dhabi, with support from the US government.
This week provided a new example of this: a complex deal involving Nvidia, Microsoft, and Anthropic. Microsoft press release He sums it up in three lines, like a subpar Allen Ginsberg poem: “Anthropic to scale Cloud on Azure / Anthropic to build NVIDIA architecture / NVIDIA and Microsoft to invest in Anthropy.” The deal bears features of what critics call a circular arrangement, in which money moves back and forth between companies before a single client gets involved. Microsoft is investing at least $5 billion in Anthropic — a direct competitor to key Microsoft partner OpenAI — and Anthropic has committed to buying $30 billion worth of computing from Microsoft’s cloud. Meanwhile, Nvidia is investing in Anthropic, which is committed to developing its technology on Nvidia chips. Poof! Nvidia delves into its customers’ businesses. Microsoft gets to hedge its previous reliance on OpenAI. Anthropic’s valuation jumps to $350 billion. (Just two months ago, it was worth $183 billion.)
Anthropic did not comment on the deal except in a press release, referring to journalists A video in which the three CEOs explain the deal. Superdomain leaders participate remotely; These deals are so routine, it doesn’t seem worth the hassle of getting on a plane to advertise them in person. In the video, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella is in the middle, smiling like a Cheshire cat as he invokes what might be the Blob’s slogan: “We will increasingly become each other’s customers.” While he explains details, others give head nods. On the left is Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. Anthropic doesn’t have its own cloud or non-AI revenue stream like Google, Microsoft, or Meta, so Microsoft has now added to its previous stock-for-compute deals with Amazon and Google. hat trick!
Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, wearing his signature leather jacket, calls the deal a “dream come true,” explaining that he’s been eyeing Anthropic for some time and is thrilled to add the company to his massive deal book. “We are present on every project in every single country,” he says. “Now, this partnership between the three of us will be able to bring AI, and bring Claude, to every organization, to every industry, around the world.”