Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt calls OpenAI and Anthropic modern colonial trading companies

What happened

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.

Washington trades closed systems for political loyalty, while Beijing gives away open-weight (a model whose trained parameters anyone may download) (published so anyone may download the trained model) models to spread its own standards. 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.

AI and society Copy the url to clipboard Share this article Go to comment section Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt calls OpenAI and Anthropic modern colonial trading companies Manuel Uth Oct 25, 2026 Nano Banana Pro prompted by THE DECODER Key Points The US and China have locked up the global AI market. Expanding it takes enormous capital, energy, and cutting-edge chips that no other country can supply at scale. OpenAI is an artificial intelligence company based in San Francisco. Anthropic is an artificial intelligence company based in San Francisco.

The authors see a potential conflict over Taiwan and chipmaker TSMC as the single greatest threat to the entire AI supply chain. The US and China have spent the past few years building AI empires, and every other country that wants access to advanced AI is becoming dependent on them.

Who can afford the race matters more than who builds artificial general intelligence first. Because model progress depends on energy, minerals, chips, and capital, software has become a scarce and therefore geopolitical resource again.

Anyone below a certain threshold "is not in the game at all." Raw materials from the Congo and data workers in Kenya earning a few dollars an hour amount to what they call "the plantation economics of the chatbot age."