There's No AI Race: Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic Were Always on the Same Team
The new Frontier Model Forum, the FLI and CAIS open letters, the focus on AI safety over AI ethics—all arrows of evidence point to the same hidden truth
If all participants win it, it is not a race. It is, instead, a masquerade.
Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic—the biggest generative AI players and the only companies building models superior to what exists today (Gemini, GPT-5, and Claude-Next)—have partnered to create the Frontier Model Forum (FMF) to ensure the “safe and responsible development of frontier AI models.” (Meta isn’t yet included presumably because it isn’t working on anything beyond GPT-4.)
These four companies have, despite explicit efforts to make it seem otherwise, many more things in common than separate them. The creation of FMF is the latest evidence that reveals they don't really care about race dynamics. They compete on a purely business level but are far less concerned about outperforming each other than they are about growing together, protected from external threats that might prevent them from thriving.
They’ve now explicitly teamed up but they were always together—if not in what they wanted to achieve definitely in how they wanted to achieve it.
Let’s unravel the masquerade.