Just as was the case for Alphabet’s Google, Meta’s Facebook and Amazon’s marketplace, the development of these six companies’ large language models (LLMs) and other AI machinery is occurring within closed, black-box systems.They’ve ingested the troves of data we all unwittingly poured into internet sites, and have built highly complex codebases into which no one has visibility. Between them, they dominate all layers of the AI stack: the storage (Amazon Web Services), the chips for computation (Nvidia), the AI models (Microsoft, with its investment in Open AI), the data (Alphabet and Meta) and the devices we use to interact with AI services (Apple). They might be competing with each other, but they form a vertically diversified oligopoly. Or rather, given the undeniable power that their technology can wield over people’s lives, they’re an oligarchy. Indeed, the secrecy around the means by which they exercise that power is characteristic of most oligarchical dictatorships.