In many ways the USA does rule the earth now. The Grand Area is big. With AI, I think there is extremely strong power laws that benefit the top performing mode

In many ways the USA does rule the earth now. The Grand Area is big. With AI, I think there is extremely strong power laws that benefit the top performing models. The best model can attract the most users, which then attracts the most capital, most data, and best researchers to make an even better model. So while there is no hard moat, one only needs to hold the pole position until the competition runs out of money. Also, even if no single AI company will rule the earth, if AI turns out to be useful, the AI companies might get a chunk of the profits from the additional usefulness. If the usefulness is sufficiently large, the chunk doesn't have to be large percentually to be large in absolute terms.