Frontier AI labs: capital, talent and compute concentrated

The chokepoint, highly time-stamped and volatile, is not a patent but the co-concentration of three scarce resources: capital, talent and compute. At the end of 2025, Anthropic and OpenAI alone accounted for roughly 15 to 20% of the world's operational AI compute (Epoch AI estimates), with OpenAI nearing ~1.7 million H100-equivalents; training a frontier model implies billions of dollars per year. Redundancy exists (several labs, open models, DeepSeek), but the compute and talent barrier to entry remains massive. Caution: the 2025-2026 landscape is shifting, figures to be reassessed often.