AI Industry Consolidates Around Five Frontier Labs Under Federal Oversight

The U.S. Commerce Department has finalized pre-deployment evaluation agreements with all five major frontier AI labs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Microsoft, xAI), creating a de facto regulatory framework for high-risk model launches. This coincides with Anthropic's reported $30B raise at ~$900B valuation, cementing extreme capital concentration in foundation model development.