Artificial intelligence has dominated the news cycle and captured a big chunk of the public’s attention since the release of ChatGPT in 2022.
Hardly a minute goes by without a news story covering AI-related developments, some company releasing a new product “integrated with AI,” or a commentator evoking the threat AI poses to our society.
While there is a lot of unwarranted hype surrounding the technology, recent advances in AI are impressive, and, if harnessed in the right way, could help society solve complex problems and boost our shared prosperity. However, the structure of the market — the actors that have control over the development and deployment of AI — will determine whether AI lives up to its promise or entrenches the power a few dominant corporations already hold over our lives.
At first glance, the recent explosion of new AI products and services could make you think the field has robust competition and that there is a fertile marketplace for new businesses to establish a foothold and grow. But this is largely an illusion.
While competition ostensibly exists in this booming industry, it is rapidly being foreclosed by the largest incumbent technology giants: Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, Nvidia, and Meta.
These dominant corporations, which already maintain an iron grip over essential aspects of our digital lives — including smartphones, internet search, online shopping, and social networking — are using their raw financial power and control over critical systems to monopolize the AI industry, exclude or co-opt competitors, and deepen the “walled gardens” that keep consumers locked into their services.
As we detail in a recent report published by the Open Markets Institute and the Mozilla Foundation, these corporate behemoths are already the primary owners and suppliers of key AI inputs and infrastructure, including cloud computing, frontier AI models, chips, and data.
To ensure they maintain and extend their dominance into the AI era, these companies are engaging in a variety of unfair business practices. Consider cloud computing, which provides the raw computational power and server capacity needed to train and host advanced AI models. Microsoft, Amazon, and, to a lesser extent, Google currently control a combined two-thirds of the global cloud computing market.
Through their market control and practically unlimited financial resources, the tech giants are rapidly co-opting many of today’s most promising AI startups, such as OpenAI and Anthropic, by giving them capital and preferential access to computational resources.
The giant firms are also using their control over digital ecosystems to lock consumers and businesses into their AI services, Google has integrated its “Gemini” AI model into its search engine and Meta has started infusing AI into Facebook and Instagram.
AI is set to dramatically reinforce the power of Big Tech — unless governments step in. Fortunately, AI remains in its nascency, and policymakers still have time to act.
Governments around the world, including the European Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States, have access to a vast set of tools to prevent AI from becoming Big Tech’s playground. Whether through antitrust enforcement that forces tech giants to split up their digital empires — preventing them from neutralizing challengers through partnerships and acquisitions — or common carrier rules requiring them to provide fair access to their digital infrastructure, regulators already have many of the tools they need to guarantee open and fair competition in AI.
We’ve seen the damaging consequences of enforcers’ failure to act in the rise of today’s platform monopolies — monopolies that are now poised to capture the benefits of AI for themselves. We can’t make the same mistake again.
Max von Thun is the Director of Europe & Transatlantic Partnerships at the Open Markets Institute.
Daniel A. Hanley is a senior legal analyst at the Open Markets Institute.
