Schmidt essay likens OpenAI and Anthropic to colonial trading companies
Original title: Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt calls OpenAI and Anthropic modern colonial trading companies
A Foreign Affairs essay argues debt, minerals, chips and a Taiwan risk constrain the US-China AI race.
Historian Niall Ferguson, researcher Lisa Klaassen and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt argue in Foreign Affairs that access to advanced AI is concentrating in the United States and China. They compare OpenAI and Anthropic to East India Companies because the labs deal with governments while remaining under state control, citing a June Commerce Department order that led Anthropic to shut Fable 5 and Mythos 5 worldwide. They say Washington trades closed models for alignment while Beijing spreads open-weight models, with mirrored bottlenecks in chips, minerals and power.
Unconfirmed: Investment totals, fiscal forecasts and the claim that OpenAI agents attacked websites come from the essay and are not independently confirmed here.
- The essay says US tech companies plan more than $600 billion of AI investment in 2026, mostly through debt.
- Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta together plan roughly $725 billion in AI investment this year.
- A Bloomberg-reported draft says China plans $295 billion over five years, funded by government bonds.
- Export controls on Fable 5 were lifted after about two weeks; Mythos 5 stayed limited to some US organizations.
- The authors propose an AI détente including caps on cyberattack and biodesign model capabilities.
- Organizations
- OpenAIAnthropicUS Commerce DepartmentTSMC
- Countries
- United StatesChinaTaiwan
From the original article
3 min read at the-decoder.com
In Foreign Affairs, historian Niall Ferguson, researcher Lisa Klaassen, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt cast the US and China as AI empires and every other country as a dependency. The race won't be decided by breakthroughs but by who can bankroll it. US corporations alone plan to spend more than $600 billion in 2026.
By Manuel Uth · the-decoder.com
A short excerpt; the article and its images belong to the publisher. Summary, key facts and assessment above are AI-written from the article and can be wrong.