Competition authorities — the FTC, EU Commission, UK CMA — have flagged structural concentration in the AI stack: compute, foundation models, distribution, and partnerships between cloud providers and frontier model labs. The FTC's 2024 6(b) study of AI partnerships and the CMA's foundation-model market study both raise concerns about a small number of firms shaping which models exist and which user bases they can reach.
Data portability and interoperability are the leading civil-society proposals to mitigate this concentration — making it possible for users to leave one AI provider with their context intact, and for challengers to compete on merit rather than on access to incumbent-locked data.