It all started, As with many things with Elon Musk. In the early 2010s he realized that AI was probably on its way to becoming the most powerful technology ever. But he deeply suspected that if it came under the control of powerful profit-driven forces, humanity would suffer. Musk was an early investor in UK-based lab DeepMind, which was at the forefront of advancing artificial general intelligence. After Google purchased DeepMind in 2014, Musk cut ties with the research organization. He felt that it was necessary to create a resistance motivated not by profit, but by humanitarian benefit. That’s why he helped create OpenAI. When I interviewed Musk and Sam Altman at the time of the company’s unveiling in 2015, they were adamant that shareholder profit would not be a factor in their decisions.
Fast forward to today. OpenAI is valued at half a trillion dollars, or perhaps $750 billion, and its for-profit arm has become a public benefit corporation. Musk, the world’s richest man, runs his own for-profit AI company, xAI. There is a lot leading to non-profit laboratories. But even the most nervous Cassandra of a decade ago probably couldn’t have imagined that advanced AI would be controlled by a single, interlocking, money-seeking giant.
This is what we have today. Even more worrying is that this interlinked complex is partly funded by foreign powers and supported by the US government, which prioritizes victory over security. This rococo collection of partnerships, mergers, funding arrangements, government initiatives and strategic investments links the fortunes of almost every major player in the AI-O sector. I call this entity a blob.
blob’s black box
A full description of the interlocking connections of these entities would take me far beyond my word limit here. Even compiling a streamlined list requires the use of – you guessed it – AI. Reader, I confess. I turned to GPT-5 for help getting the full picture. “My head is spinning,” I wrote, swallowing my pride to ask this smug stochastic parrot about an extensive list of cloud deals, investments, partnerships, and government arrangements. The normally speedy LLM took two minutes and 35 seconds to come back with some answers. “You’re not wrong it’s dizzying,” said the bot, ever the sycophant. “It’s basically a giant spherical money-and-count machine.” Note to GPT: You do not get to write display text for this essay. Leave the editorializing to me. In any case, once it stopped its pedantry, GPT-5 started churning out several thousand words with flow charts, arrows, and cross-references to dozens of back-scratching arrangements, such as the prestigious Stargate initiative that tied OpenAI, Oracle, Nvidia, SoftBank, and an Abu Dhabi investment firm with the backing of the US government.
This week brought a fresh case: a complex deal involving Nvidia, Microsoft and Anthropic. Microsoft’s press release summed it up in three lines, like a cheesy Allen Ginsberg poem: “NVIDIA and Microsoft to invest in Anthropic/NVIDIA architecture to scale the cloud on Azure.” The deal hints at what critics call a circular arrangement, whereby money moves back and forth between companies before a single customer is on board. Microsoft is investing at least $5 billion in Anthropic – a direct rival to Microsoft’s major partner OpenAI – and Anthropic has committed to buying $30 billion worth of compute from Microsoft’s cloud. Meanwhile, Nvidia invests in Anthropic, which is committed to developing its technology on Nvidia chips. Poof! Nvidia dives deep into its customers’ businesses. Microsoft gets an escape from its earlier reliance on OpenAI. And Anthropic’s valuation increased to $350 billion. (Just two months ago, it was valued at $183 billion.)
Anthropic did not comment on the deal other than in a press release, pointing journalists to a video where the three CEOs explain the deal. Hyperscale bosses participate remotely; These deals are so routine that it’s clearly not worth it to bother getting on a plane to have them announced in person. In the video, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella appears in the middle, smiling like a Cheshire cat, in what could be the Blob’s slogan: “We’re increasingly going to be each other’s customers.” The others nod and nod as he details. At left is Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. Anthropic doesn’t have its own cloud or non-AI-related 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,” explaining that he’s been keeping an eye on Anthropic for some time and is thrilled to add the company to his burgeoning deal book. “We are in every enterprise in every single country,” he says. “Now this partnership of the three of us will be able to bring AI, bring cloud to every enterprise, every industry, around the world.”