CONCEPT
The Big Nine
Amy Webb’s term for the nine corporations—six American, three Chinese—on whose decisions the
trajectory of machine intelligence depends, each structurally captured by incentives that have nothing to do with the long-term welfare of the humanity whose future they are building.
Nine companies are building the future of artificial intelligence. This is not a metaphor.
Amy Webb's 2019 analysis identified the G-MAFIA—Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, IBM, and Apple on the American side—and the BAT—Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent on the Chinese—as the institutions that own most of the relevant patents, attract most of the relevant talent, fund most of the foundational research, and increasingly shape the universities that train the next generation of AI researchers. Together they constitute what Webb calls a closed supernetwork, a tight cluster of institutions whose decisions about what to build, how to build it, and what to optimize for will determine the character of the most powerful technology in human history. The people inside these companies are, Webb insists, not villains; they are captives. The G-MAFIA are captive to Wall Street—to the relentless quarterly pressure for growth, commercial application, and faster shipping than the competition. The BAT are captive to the