How our AI & Market Power Fellows are fighting back against tech oligarchy

Vera Franz, who spearheaded the creation of the AI & Market Power Fellowship with the European AI & Society Foundation, summarises how the Fellows are fighting back. Vera is Independent Philanthropic Advisor and Honorary Senior Research Fellow at UCL Faculty of Laws.

As Big Tech’s grip on AI tightens, investigating how tech monopolies entrench and abuse their power is more urgent than ever. The European AI & Society Fund’s AI & Market Power Fellows are doing just that: studying and explaining how the global rush to large-scale AI positions a handful of corporations to dominate the digital infrastructure of the future. 

Why does this matter? If a handful of tech giants like Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta  control this market, they alone will determine what type of AI gets built, and what is left behind. They also have the political power to block any guardrails policy makers establish to govern technology. They’ve already been lobbying hard to try to unpick the European Union’s AI Act. In short, if we leave a few tech monopolies to decide what AI we have, they will line their pockets – not innovate to protect democracy and our planet.

The current geopolitical moment offers an opportunity to push back. There is enormous political energy, in Europe and around the world, for decisive action to break the stranglehold of dominant U.S. tech firms on our societies and economies, to open up space for alternative tech infrastructures. As the Landscape Report 2025 by AI Now puts it,

“the tech oligarchy has successfully deployed AI to cement and grow its power. At the same time, this power is vastly inflated, contingent, and poised for disruption”.

The AI & Market Power Fellows provide critical insights to inform this disruption.

Big Tech are the essential suppliers to other developers building AI. They pick winners and losers by deciding who gets access to their assets under which terms. Not only do they control 67% of the cloud market.They also own the distribution platforms – online marketplaces, app stores, smartphones and productivity software – which developers need to get their innovations to users. David Widder, one of the Fellows, studies how investment decisions of cloud providers consolidate their vertical integration of the AI market, and build dependence and lock in into their cloud offering. 

Meanwhile Margarida Silva and Nicolas Eschenbaum are studying chokepoints model developers – including open-source developers – are grappling with. Margarida’s analysis of the value chain of genAI has found Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Nvidia are the real winners of the AI race.

The vertical integration of Big Tech across the AI supply chain means they control most essential inputs for AI developments, such as compute, data and capital. Where they don’t already control these assets – as with journalism and other high-value datasets – they steal or license it. For example, Google’s AI Overviews are synthesizing information from multiple web sources including journalism.The Fellows Friso Bostoen and Giorgio Monti are developing a proposal for a market in AI training data, which if implemented would force those companies currently stealing content from journalists and other creators to pay up. 

Some of the Fellows are studying the promise of alternatives. For example, Isha Suri, Shyam Krishnakumar and Titiksha Vashist are exploring if a Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) based approach to open cloud computing for AI can emerge as a viable alternative to existing market concentration in compute infrastructure.

Finally, some Fellowship projects are looking at how this market power creeps into other sectors and entrenches control across the economy. Jim Thomas is exploring the new field of generative biology, studying who is poised to emerge as the big structural players. Yung Au and Srujana Katt are studying the military use of large AI models while investigative journalists Louis Boyd – Madsen, Gabriele Di Donfrancesco and Clément Pouré are looking at the use of AI in energy markets.

 The European AI & Society Fund will be sharing more detail about each Fellow’s work. Sign up to our newsletter to get the latest updates.