The companies in the race and what each is doing right now. Profiles are established fact; the "latest" lines are pulled live from the wire and the timeline — add one wire entry and these cards update.
OpenAI
Founded
2015 · San Francisco
Flagship
GPT · ChatGPT · Sora
The lab that scaled the Transformer into a consumer product and dragged the whole industry into the race. Microsoft is the compute partner.
Latest on the wire
Aug 17, 2026deal — NVIDIA secured land, power, and shell at SB Energy's PORTS-Pike campus in Pike County, Ohio, to exclusively host NVIDIA AI compute. OpenAI is the tenant; NVIDIA is investing $1.5 billion in SB Energy. Read the article →
Aug 17, 2026deal — NVIDIA guarantees Ohio PORTS-Pike AI campus. Land, power, and shell — locked for NVIDIA compute, with OpenAI as tenant. Read the article →
Apr 2026release — GPT-5.5. OpenAI's "smartest and most intuitive" model, with a 1M-token context window. Read the article →
Founded by ex-OpenAI researchers, led by Dario and Daniela Amodei, on the argument that the race needed a safety-first runner. Amazon and Google are the big backers.
Latest on the wire
Jun 30, 2026release — Claude Sonnet 5. The workhorse Sonnet line gets a new generation after 4.6. Read the article →
Jun 9, 2026release — Claude Fable 5. Anthropic breaks its own naming convention for its most anticipated release yet. Read the article →
Apr 24, 2026deal — Google to invest up to $40B in Anthropic. The other hyperscaler writes a frontier-lab check at industrial scale. Read the article →
2010 London · bought by Google 2014 · merged with Brain 2023
Flagship
Gemini · AlphaGo · AlphaFold
Invented the Transformer, beat Lee Sedol, folded two rival labs into one, and ships Gemini into everything Google touches.
Latest on the wire
Aug 13, 2026release — Google introduced Gemini 3.7 Flash, its workhorse model for coding and agents, at an introductory $0.75 / $3.75 per million input/output tokens through the end of 2026. Read the article →
Aug 13, 2026release — Gemini 3.7 Flash. Google's workhorse Flash model for coding and agents, three weeks after 3.6. Read the article →
Apr 24, 2026deal — Google to invest up to $40B in Anthropic. The other hyperscaler writes a frontier-lab check at industrial scale. Read the article →
Musk's rejoinder to the lab he co-founded and left. Built the Colossus cluster at improbable speed; ships Grok into X.
Latest on the wire
Aug 11, 2026release — Grok Bot launched in beta: AI teammates with their own cloud computers, sold through Cursor Ultra and SuperGrok Heavy. Access widened August 21. Read the article →
Aug 11, 2026release — Cursor and SpaceXAI ship Grok Bot. An agent with its own computer, sold through Cursor, wearing the Grok name. Read the article →
Apr 2026lab — Musk v. OpenAI trial begins. The 2018 rift finally goes to court. Read the article →
Sells the shovels. Every lab on this page queues for the same silicon, and the CUDA moat is why.
Latest on the wire
Aug 17, 2026deal — NVIDIA secured land, power, and shell at SB Energy's PORTS-Pike campus in Pike County, Ohio, to exclusively host NVIDIA AI compute. OpenAI is the tenant; NVIDIA is investing $1.5 billion in SB Energy. Read the article →
Aug 17, 2026deal — NVIDIA guarantees Ohio PORTS-Pike AI campus. Land, power, and shell — locked for NVIDIA compute, with OpenAI as tenant. Read the article →
Aug 10, 2026deal — NVIDIA announced partnerships with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR to establish AI compute financing platforms intended to mobilize over $500 billion of third-party capital. The memorandums of understanding remain subject to final agreements. Read the article →