Tech Policy Press - The Paris AI Action Summit: A Pivotal Moment to Reclaim AI from Big Tech
Europe director Max von Thun co-wrote a piece alongside fellow Michelle Nie discussing French AI Action Summit must address Big Tech's control over AI infrastructure and policy to ensure AI aligns with the public interest and independent regulation.
Early next month, the French government will host its AI Action Summit in Paris. Building on a series of safety-focused convenings in the UK and South Korea, the French Summit takes a broader perspective on AI. It aims to “deliver the critical public goods needed to align AI with the public interest.” However, the summit will fail to achieve this goal unless it tackles the elephant in the room – Big Tech’s growing dominance over the AI ecosystem and its creeping capture of AI governance, now increasingly backed by the might of the United States government.
The dominance of Big Tech in the AI ecosystem is already deeply entrenched. The cloud hyperscalers – Amazon, Google, and Microsoft – control two-thirds of the market for cloud computing, a critical input for training and operating AI models. Big Tech has actual or de facto control over most of the leading frontier AI labs, including OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind, and Mistral. Nvidia and TSMC hold monopolies over the design and manufacturing of advanced AI chips. Beyond this core infrastructure, the tech giants also control the majority of the commercial gateways used by most individuals and organizations to access AI systems, including smartphones, operating systems, browsers, and search engines.
This concentration of power extends beyond the private sector. Governments themselves are becoming increasingly dependent on tech monopolies for core services and infrastructure. They are shifting more and more of their operations, from public education and healthcare to defense and policing, into the cloud. And they are adopting Big Tech’s AI solutions across the public sector, with the UK government recently announcing plans to “mainline AI into the veins of the nation.”
Just as worryingly, policymakers are outsourcing the development of AI policy to corporations that profit from AI technologies themselves. Big Tech’s fingerprints are all over AI policy, from working groups for the EU AI Act Code of Practice to advising on national AI strategies, including the French government’s latest “notre ambition.” Policymakers have been far too eager to embrace these corporations as benevolent sources of expertise and innovation while ignoring or downplaying the risks of letting the foxes guard the regulatory henhouse.
Read full article here.