The Game Theory of Frontier AI
For three years, the frontier was a race. The lab that shipped the best model fastest captured the cycle. That game ended in April. Three governance postures have crystallized into commercial categories — and they do not converge.
They separate. But the choice of posture is the surface of a deeper picture: three hidden games run beneath it. A regulatory game over who writes the rules. A geopolitical game over which bloc wins the frontier. And an open-source game where Western open-source AI is alive only because the closed frontier has been quietly subsidizing it through distillation.
The three games explain why each lab is making the choice it is — and why the discipline premium has consequences that reach far past Anthropic’s balance sheet.
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