It all started, Elon Musk is like that, and a lot of things are like that. In the early 2010s, he realized that AI was on track to become perhaps the most powerful technology in history. However, he had deep doubts that if this country were to come under the control of powerful, profit-seeking forces, humanity would suffer. Musk was an early investor in DeepMind, a UK-based research institute that was pioneering the pursuit of artificial general intelligence. After Google acquired DeepMind in 2014, Musk severed ties with the research organization. He felt it was essential to create a counter-force motivated not by profit but by the interests of humanity. There he helped create OpenAI. When I interviewed Musk and Sam Altman at a company presentation in 2015, they were adamant that shareholder interests were not a factor in their decision-making.
Let’s fast forward to today. OpenAI is valued at $5 trillion, or perhaps $750 billion, and its commercial arm has become a public benefit corporation. Musk, the world’s richest man, runs his own commercial AI company, xAI. So much for nonprofit institutes leading the way. But even Cassandra, at her most panicky ten years ago, probably never imagined that advanced AI would be controlled by a single, interlocking, money-hungry giant.
That’s who we are today. Even more concerning is that the complex is partially funded by foreign powers and supported by the U.S. government, which appears to prioritize safety. This rococo-inspired collection of partnerships, mergers, financing arrangements, government initiatives, and strategic investments ties together the fates of nearly every major company in the AI-o-sphere. I call this entity Blob.
blob black box
A complete description of the interconnections of these entities would far exceed the character limit here. Creating a streamlined list requires, as you might imagine, the use of AI. Reader, I have a confession. I went to GPT-5 to get the full picture. “My head is spinning,” I wrote, suppressing my pride in asking this smug probabilistic parrot for a comprehensive list of cloud deals, investments, partnerships, and government arrangements. It took the usually quick LLM two minutes and 35 seconds to come up with some answers. “It’s not wrong to feel dizzy,” said the ever-sycophantic bot. “This is basically one giant circular money and computing machine.” Notes to GPT: You cannot write the display text for this essay. Please leave the editing to me. In any case, once it ceased its commentary work, GPT-5 continued to churn out thousands of words with flowcharts, arrows, and cross-references to dozens of behind-the-scenes deals, including the iconic Stargate initiative, which linked OpenAI, Oracle, Nvidia, SoftBank, and an Abu Dhabi investment firm with support from the U.S. government.
This week brought us a newer example: a complex deal involving Nvidia, Microsoft, and Anthropic. Microsoft’s press release sums it up in three lines, like an Allen Ginsberg poem: “Anthropic scales clouds on Azure / Anthropic adopts NVIDIA architecture / NVIDIA and Microsoft invest in Anthropic.” The deal has the hallmarks of what critics call a circular arrangement, with money moving back and forth between companies before a single customer is involved. Microsoft has invested at least $5 billion in Anthropic, a direct competitor to Microsoft’s main partner OpenAI, and Anthropic has committed to buying $30 billion worth of computing from Microsoft’s cloud. Meanwhile, Nvidia has invested in Anthropic, which is working to develop technology on Nvidia chips. Hmm! Nvidia is deeply involved in our customers’ businesses. Microsoft can avoid the risks from its previous reliance on OpenAI. And Anthropic’s valuation jumps to $350 billion. (Just two months ago, its value was $183 billion.)
Anthropic did not comment on the deal beyond the press release, pointing journalists to a video of its three CEOs explaining the deal. Hyperscale bosses will participate remotely. These deals are so routine that it doesn’t seem worth the hassle of getting on a plane to announce them in person. In the video, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella appears in the center, grinning like a Cheshire cat and chanting what appears to be the Blob slogan. “We are increasingly becoming each other’s customers.” The others nod at the bobblehead as he explains the details. On the left is Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. Anthropic added Microsoft to its previous stock-for-compute deals with Amazon and Google because it doesn’t have its own cloud or non-AI revenue streams like Google, Microsoft, or Meta. hat trick!
Wearing a distinctive leather jacket, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang called the deal a “dream come true,” detailing that he had been eyeing Anthropic for some time and was excited to add the company to his extensive book of deals. “We are in every company in every country,” he says. “This partnership between the three of us will bring AI – and Claude – to every company and every industry in the world.”
