Schmidt and co-authors liken OpenAI and Anthropic to the East India Company
What happened
On 25 October 2026, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, historian Niall Ferguson and others wrote in Foreign Affairs comparing OpenAI and Anthropic to the colonial-era East India Company. The article argues that model progress depends on energy, minerals, chips and capital, making software a geopolitical resource again. The view has drawn attention since The Decoder reported it, and the discussion is ongoing.
Written by AI from the reports · updated 2 h ago
Timeline
Follow the reports to see the event from each side.
- The DecoderEx-Google CEO Eric Schmidt calls OpenAI and Anthropic modern colonial trading companies
In Foreign Affairs, historian Niall Ferguson, researcher Lisa Klaassen, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt cast the US and China as AI empires and every other country as a dependency. The race won't be decided by breakthroughs but by who can bankroll it. US corporations alone plan to spend more than $600 billion in 2026.
Heat of this event
Not enough continuous observations yet to draw a trend.