AI’s Power Players Are Racing to Own the Chips, the Consumer—and the Rules
AI’s Power Players Are Racing to Own the Chips, the Consumer—and the Rules
The push to control more of the AI stack did not begin with Anthropic. In June, OpenAI unveiled Jalapeño, a Broadcom-built chip tailored to inference workloads, while Google DeepMind has long used Alphabet’s TPUs and Meta has been developing MTIA accelerators. Anthropic is now following the same logic: it is assembling a custom-silicon team to co-design hardware and models so Claude can run “faster and more efficiently.”
That move follows reports last month that Anthropic was exploring Samsung as a manufacturing partner. The company already has computing arrangements with AWS, Google, Nvidia and AMD, but rising demand for Claude is making outside capacity look less like a solution than a dependency. Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president, captured the adjacent opportunity in a terse post: “ai for chip design is underrated.”
The next front is distribution. During a crowded week of releases—Anthropic’s Opus 5.5 followed 90 minutes later by GPT-6 updates—Meta’s personal agent Muse reportedly drew attention by outpacing ChatGPT’s early numbers. Meta’s apparent plan is not simply to compete at the model frontier, but to push AI into smart glasses and a small Tamagotchi-style device, putting an assistant in consumers’ hands and on their faces.
Then comes the geopolitical collision. At a White House summit on Thursday, President Trump and Xi Jinping were expected to discuss Silicon Valley’s allegations that Chinese AI companies, including Alibaba, use “distillation” to copy advanced American systems. Trump called “super intelligence” one of the pressing issues on the agenda and said AI would be a “big topic of discussion,” while signaling no immediate shift in regulation.
Taken together, the developments show an industry fighting on three linked terrains: proprietary chips for computing power, devices for consumer loyalty, and policy for protection from foreign rivals.
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