The Missing Rival: China and the Limits of AI Antitrust
The standard AI competition story has plenty of supposed villains. It just keeps leaving out one of the biggest.
Regulators and academics warn that a small group of firms—including Amazon, Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI, with Microsoft and Meta sometimes added—will dominate generative artificial intelligence. Their advantages in computing power, capital, data, and distribution will harden into market power, shut out challengers, and concentrate control over a technology reshaping the economy.
Public agencies have embraced this account. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), U.K. Competition and Markets Authority (DMA), and European Commission advanced it in their Joint Statement on Competition in Generative AI, which I have discussed before.
Academics have raised similar concerns, even as the sector continues to grow quickly. Much of their attention centers on “GAMMA”—Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, and Apple—and those firms’ control over critical inputs such as data and computing capacity. The fear is that these advantages could produce an “AI oligopoly.”
That theory has given regulators a reason to act early. In the European Union, it has shaped Digital Markets Act (DMA) specification proceedings, Article 102 investigations, and emergency interim measures. In Brazil, it has pushed merger review beyond mandatory notification thresholds to reach AI partnerships. In Italy, it has prompted proceedings over Meta’s integration of AI into WhatsApp before regulators established any consumer harm.
As I argued in an earlier post, these interventions follow the same logic. Regulators treat a plausible theory of harm as enough to justify immediate action, while giving limited weight to the safeguards that ordinarily discipline competition enforcement. That approach risks suppressing the very practices through which AI firms compete, including integration, partnerships, and the use of existing distribution networks.
Yet the larger flaw appears even earlier in the analysis. The story remains almost entirely Western. Regulators cast GAMMA, OpenAI, and Anthropic as the firms to contain, then focus on their relationships with one another and with U.S. and European complementors, meaning companies whose products or services increase the value of another firm’s offering.
Meanwhile, one of the fastest-growing sources of competitive pressure in global AI barely appears in market-definition exercises, foreclosure theories, or claims that power in older markets will carry over into AI.
China is missing from the case file.