It all started like many other things, with Elon Musk. In the early 2010s, he realized that artificial intelligence was on its way to becoming perhaps the most powerful technology of all time. However, he had deep suspicions that humanity would suffer if it fell under the control of powerful profit-driven forces. Musk was an early investor in DeepMind, a British lab that was at the forefront of work on artificial general intelligence. After Google bought DeepMind in 2014, Musk cut ties with the research organization. He believed it was necessary to create a counterforce motivated by human benefits rather than profits. So he helped create OpenAI. When I spoke to Musk and Sam Altman at the company’s unveiling in 2015, they were adamant that shareholder profit would not be a factor in their decisions.
Speedy forward to today. OpenAI is worth it half a trillion dollars, or maybe $750 billion, and its for-profit arm became a public benefit corporation. Musk, the world’s richest man, runs his own for-profit company xAI. So much for leading nonprofit labs. But even the most panicked Cassandra of a decade ago probably couldn’t have imagined that an advanced artificial intelligence would be controlled by a single, interconnected and money-hungry colossus.
That’s what we have today. Even more disturbing, this interconnected complicated is partly financed by foreign powers and supported by a US government that appears to value victory over security. This rococo collection of partnerships, mergers, financing arrangements, government initiatives and strategic investments connects the fortunes of virtually every major player in the AI sphere. I call this creature the Blob.
Blob’s black box
A full description of the interconnectedness of these entities would be beyond the limits of my words. Even making a simplified list requires the employ of – you guessed it – artificial intelligence. Reader, I confess. I went to GPT-5 to facilitate me get the full picture. “My head is spinning,” I wrote, swallowing my pride and asking this stochastic-happy parrot for an extensive list of cloud deals, investments, partnerships, and government arrangements. Two minutes and 35 seconds passed before the usually quick LLM returned with some answers. “You’re right, it’s dizzying,” said the bot, ever the flatterer. “It’s basically one giant, circular money-making and computing machine.” Note to GPT: You cannot write the text displayed for this essay. Leave the editorial staff to me. In any case, once he stopped his analysis, GPT-5 began writing several thousand words complete with flowcharts, arrows, and references to dozens of agreements such as the iconic Stargate initiative, which brings together OpenAI, Oracle, Nvidia, Softbank, and an Abu Dhabi investment firm, with the support of the US government.
A more recent example emerged this week: a complicated deal involving Nvidia, Microsoft and Anthropic. Microsoft press release sums it up in three lines, like a bad Allen Ginsberg verse: “Anthropic will scale Claude on Azure / Anthropic will adopt NVIDIA architecture / NVIDIA and Microsoft will invest in Anthropic.” The deal has the hallmarks of what critics call a round-robin 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 of Microsoft’s key partner OpenAI — and Anthropic has committed to purchasing $30 billion worth of compute resources from Microsoft’s cloud. Meanwhile, Nvidia is investing in Anthropic, which has committed to developing its technology on Nvidia chips. Pouf! Nvidia digs deeper into its customers’ businesses. Microsoft gains a cushion from its previous reliance on OpenAI. And Anthropic’s valuation jumps to $350 billion. (Just two months ago it was valued at $183 billion.)
Anthropic did not comment on the deal beyond the press release, pointing to journalists video in which the three CEOs explain the deal. Hyperscale executives participate remotely; these offers are so routine that it’s apparently not worth the bother of getting on a plane and announcing them in person. In the video, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella appears in the middle, beaming like a Cheshire Cat, invoking what might be the Blob’s slogan: “We will increasingly be each other’s customers.” As he outlines the details, the others nod. On the left is Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. Anthropic doesn’t have its own cloud or non-AI revenue streams like Google, Microsoft or Meta, so it has now added Microsoft to its previous compute resource 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 has been eyeing Anthropic for some time and is excited to add the company to his extensive deal book. “We are present in every company in every country,” he says. “Now, with the three of us, we will be able to bring AI and Claude to every enterprise, every industry around the world.”