To unleash AI innovation, stop model providers from picking the winners

Artificial intelligence (AI) promises to find its way into every corner of our digital lives. The headlines focus on ever-bigger models, but the future will be determined by applications built on those models. Who builds those applications—the ones that will reshape medicine, education, software development, and mundane back-end enterprise services—has not yet been decided. Whether future applications will be determined by oligopolists or entrepreneurs depends on who controls the infrastructure those applications need. Three companies—Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google—have established themselves as the dominant foundation model builders. Application developers build their tools atop those models. Total payments for such access reached over $37 billion in 2025, tripling in a single year. These AI models have become the essential infrastructure of the 21st century. The problem is that the companies that control access to those foundation models are also developing their own applications. When model providers build, buy, and invest in applications, they end up competing with the startups that depend on them. The fact that those companies build applications is not the problem, but it becomes a problem when they use their platform to limit or control the activities of others. Such a conflict is an invitation to abuse.

[Asad Ramzanali is the Director of Artificial Intelligence & Technology Policy - Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator. Tom Wheeler is Visiting Fellow - Governance Studies, Center for Technology Innovation (CTI)]