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

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. High debt, domestic resistance, and a potential war over Taiwan threaten both powers, argue historian Niall Ferguson, researcher Lisa Klaassen, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. In their essay for Foreign Affairs, they ground the empire analogy in scaling laws. Because model progress depends on energy, minerals, chips, and capital, software has become a scarce and therefore geopolitical resource again.

First reported by The Decoder. This page is a short excerpt; the full text is theirs.