The big tech firms want an AI monopoly – but the UK watchdog can bring them to heel John Naughton

"Monopoly," said Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley's answer to Darth Vader, "is the condition of every successful business." This aspiration is widely shared by Gamman, the new acronynm for the Valley's giants – Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and Nvidia. And the arrival of AI has sharpened the appetite of each for attaining that blessed state before the others get there. One symptom of their anxiety is the way they have been throwing unconscionable amounts of money at the 70-odd generative AI startups that have mushroomed since it became clear that AI was going to be the new new thing. Microsoft reportedly put 13bn (about 10.4bn) into OpenAI, for example, but it was also the lead investor in a 1.3bn funding round for Inflection, Deepmind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman's startup.