What the US masters of artificial intelligence really want
Sunday, 26 April 2026
Professor Alexandra Andhov believes the world’s largest Artificial Intelligence (AI) and tech companies follow the path set by one of the sector’s most well-known people - and that path leads them directly to total domination.
Andhov, from the University of Auckland’s Advancing Law and Technology Responsibly Centre, opened the ALTeR conference on AI this week by warning that American big tech companies “follow Peter Thiel's advice”.
“Thiel, probably the most influential technology investor of the past thirty years, tells every founder to aim for a monopoly. Not market leadership. Monopoly. Because in Thiel's framework, competition is for losers. The goal is to build something so dominant, so embedded, so structurally necessary, that you set the terms. That you become the architecture.
“And here is the crucial detail when it comes to the Big Tech: They became monopolies given that no proper regulatory framework applying to them was in place.”
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She said the policy consensus in government was “technology is innovation. Innovation is growth. Growth is good. Do not constrain it”.
Unlike things like domestic banks and power companies, big tech companies face no conduct obligations.
Andhov said they also faced no capital requirements, no licensing regimes, and no public interest duties.
They grew unencumbered into the gaps that law had not yet thought to fill, she said.
“By the time anyone thought seriously about the regulatory architecture … the companies were already the infrastructure; already too embedded to regulate without disrupting everything that depended on them.”
Amazon Web Services ran approximately a third of the internet, she said.
Microsoft Azure ran much of the world's enterprise computing.
Google handled around 90% of global search.
They were so dominant, and their businesses were so capital intensive, it was structurally impossible for any new entrant to compete at the foundation layer.
“What happens to the rest? What happens to the countries, the companies, the workers who are not inside that concentration? What happens to competition, to innovation, to the distribution of economic opportunity, when the architecture of the global economy runs on systems owned by a handful of companies - really individuals - incorporated in one country, subject to its intelligence demands?”
That country was the US.
“The digital infrastructure of hospitals, courts, schools, universities, militaries and governments runs on their systems,” she said.
However, she said: “We have been here before.”
“In the late 19th century, the telegraph and then the telephone were transformative technologies. Private companies built the networks. They owned the infrastructure. They set the terms. And for a period, governments watched, uncertain how to characterise what these companies actually were. Were they publishers? Carriers? Private businesses? Public utilities?
“Eventually, the answer arrived. Telecommunications companies were infrastructure. And infrastructure, because it was load-bearing, because society depended on it, because the consequences of its failure or abuse were collective, had to be governed differently.”
That meant they were regulated with access obligations, interconnection requirements, duties to serve, and accountability to the public interest, not just to shareholders.
“Big tech is the nervous system of society now. The question is whether we have the institutional courage to say so, and to build the architecture that follows,” she said.