In the early days of the LLM era, there was lots of talk about how big incumbents, in particular google would be disadvantaged relative to “startups” like OpenAI because of their valuable legacy businesses that could be destroyed if something went wrong. Mainly people thought about big lawsuits but government action is similar.

Now OpenAI and Anthropic are big incumbents with Trillion dollar valuations at stake, so they can’t take any risks. Unlike google they don’t really have a thriving primary business to protect though, so without being able to continue to take risks and ignore regulation startup-style, it’s going to be a lot harder for them to stay relevant.