Google’s Gemini 3 model has topped most benchmarks, but Google still seems to believe that it’ll be better for the world if no one company controls AI.
In a recent conversation, Google CEO Sundar Pichai addressed concerns about AI monopolization, pushing back against the notion that any single company—including his own—could or should dominate the artificial intelligence landscape. His comments came as he acknowledged criticisms from figures like Elon Musk while painting a picture of an increasingly diverse and competitive AI ecosystem.
“I think Elon is rightfully pointing out that no one company should own a technology as powerful as AI,” Pichai said. “But I think if you look at the current state of the ecosystem, I think there are many, many companies. I would argue there are many companies, many frontier models.”
The Google chief emphasized the growing diversity in AI development, pointing to forces that are reshaping the competitive landscape. “You have open source models coming in with China, right?” he noted, highlighting how the AI race has become truly global and multipolar.
Pichai dismissed concerns about monopolization as premature given the current market dynamics. “If there was only one company which was building AI technology and everyone else had to use it, I would be concerned about that too,” he explained. “But we are so far from that scenario right now.”
His comments reflect a broader reality in the AI industry that has emerged over the past two years. While Google has long been a leader in AI research—having pioneered the transformer architecture that powers modern large language models—the company now faces intense competition from multiple directions. OpenAI’s ChatGPT sparked the current AI boom and maintains significant market presence through its partnership with Microsoft. Anthropic, founded by former OpenAI researchers, has developed Claude as a serious competitor. Meta has pursued an aggressive open-source strategy with its Llama models, making powerful AI accessible to developers worldwide. Meanwhile, Chinese companies like Alibaba, Baidu, and DeepSeek are advancing their own frontier models, operating in a separate but parallel ecosystem.
The open-source movement, first spearheaded by Meta, and then taken over by China, has particularly democratized AI development. This proliferation of models—commercial and open-source, Western and Chinese—supports Pichai’s assertion that the AI landscape is far from consolidated. Whether this diversity persists as the technology matures and computational requirements escalate remains an open question, but for now, even with Gemini 3’s dominance, the AI race appears to be anything but a one-company show.