{"id":248505,"date":"2026-05-18T11:38:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-18T15:38:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/18\/to-unleash-ai-innovation-stop-model-providers-from-picking-the-winners\/"},"modified":"2026-05-18T11:45:17","modified_gmt":"2026-05-18T15:45:17","slug":"to-unleash-ai-innovation-stop-model-providers-from-picking-the-winners","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/18\/to-unleash-ai-innovation-stop-model-providers-from-picking-the-winners\/","title":{"rendered":"To unleash AI innovation, stop model providers from picking the winners"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.brookings.edu\/articles\/to-unleash-ai-innovation-stop-model-providers-from-picking-the-winners\/\">To unleash AI innovation, stop model providers from picking the winners<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.brookings.edu\/articles\/to-unleash-ai-innovation-stop-model-providers-from-picking-the-winners\/\">https:\/\/www.brookings.edu\/articles\/to-unleash-ai-innovation-stop-model-providers-from-picking-the-winners\/<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Publish Date: <a href=\"publish_date]\">2026-05-18 11:38:00<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Source Domain: <a href=\"www.brookings.edu\">www.brookings.edu<\/a><\/p>\n<p>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\u2014the ones that will reshape medicine, education, software development, and mundane back-end enterprise services\u2014has not yet been decided. Whether future applications will be determined by oligopolists or entrepreneurs depends on who controls the infrastructure those applications need.<\/p>\n<p>Three companies\u2014Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google\u2014have 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, according to Menlo Ventures.<\/p>\n<p>These AI models have become the essential infrastructure of the 21st century. In the startup incubator Y Combinator\u2019s summer 2025 cohort, for instance, nine out of 10 companies were AI-native, meaning they were built from the ground up with AI. Nearly all were dependent on the three dominant companies for the models underpinning their offerings.<\/p>\n<p>A startup building a coding agent or medical diagnostics tool writes code that sends requests to an AI model, and the model presents the results. The startup does not build its own model, which can cost hundreds of millions of dollars; instead, it buys access to a model. This may be efficient, but it exposes a profound competitive deficiency.<\/p>\n<p>The problem is that the companies that control access to those foundation models are also developing their own applications. Anthropic sells access to Claude while marketing Claude Code and Claude Cowork, its own coding agent and enterprise tool. Thousands of third-party AI application developers rely on OpenAI, while it has begun a spree of acquiring AI applications developers across coding, personal finance, and health tech. Google has already embedded its&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.brookings.edu\/articles\/to-unleash-ai-innovation-stop-model-providers-from-picking-the-winners\/\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>To unleash AI innovation, stop model providers from picking the winners https:\/\/www.brookings.edu\/articles\/to-unleash-ai-innovation-stop-model-providers-from-picking-the-winners\/ Publish Date: 2026-05-18&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":248506,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.brookings.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/GettyImages-2235804695-1.jpg?quality=75","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-248505","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248505"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=248505"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248505\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":248507,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248505\/revisions\/248507"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/248506"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=248505"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=248505"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=248505"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}