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Race to AGI - Sunday, December 7, 2025
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TLDR
EU probes Meta WhatsApp AI policy abuse
Chile and Mexico sign AI cooperation pact
Hinton: Google beginning to overtake OpenAI
BIDU +5.8%, CRM +5.3% on platform optimism
SNOW -2.5% as neutral platforms face pressure
The Full Story
The center of gravity in AI today shifted noticeably toward policymakers. The European Commission opened a formal antitrust investigation into Meta's new policy limiting third-party AI providers on WhatsApp Business, probing whether the company is abusing its dominance in messaging to favor its own 'Meta AI' assistant. The October 2025 policy effectively blocks AI providers whose primary service is an assistant or chatbot from distributing through WhatsApp's Business API in the EEA, while leaving Meta's own assistant available. For the Commission, this is not a narrow API dispute; it is an early test of whether AI distribution can be locked inside the ecosystems of dominant platforms.
The stakes are substantial. WhatsApp is the default communications layer for many small businesses across Europe. If Meta can decide which AI assistants are allowed to reach users there, it can tilt the emerging assistant market toward its own stack and away from independent providers. Today's case will therefore be watched closely not just by Meta's immediate rivals, but by every model company that hopes to reach billions of users via messaging apps rather than operating systems or browsers.
Regulators aren't acting in isolation. In Latin America, Chile and Mexico signed a letter of intent to promote responsible AI development, tying together research collaboration, talent pipelines, and shared compute infrastructure. The agreement explicitly references Mexico's Coatlicue project, billed as the most powerful public supercomputer in the region and intended to connect into scientific networks such as RedCLARA to strengthen Latin American technological sovereignty.
At the same time that policymakers are trying to open distribution and coordinate governance, the frontier race between labs is intensifying. Geoffrey Hinton, long associated with Google and often dubbed the 'Godfather of AI', argued this week that Google is "beginning to overtake" OpenAI and that his "guess is Google will win" the AI race. He points to Google's Gemini 3 family, its Nano Banana Pro image model, and its vertically integrated chip and data stack as evidence that the company is now pulling ahead after a period of uncharacteristic caution.
Market pricing today reinforced this policy-plus-platform picture more than it reacted to any single headline. China's Baidu, a leading domestic foundation model player, rose 5.85%, while enterprise-software incumbent Salesforce gained 5.3%, and chip and infrastructure names Broadcom and Intel were up 2.4% and 2.25% respectively. Meanwhile, Snowflake, a data-platform pure play, slipped 2.55%. Investors appear to be leaning toward integrated incumbents that can both own data/workflows and absorb regulatory costs, and toward hardware suppliers that benefit from any outcome in the model race.
Taken together, today's developments underscore how AGI-relevant progress is being shaped as much by rulemaking and distribution control as by model benchmarks. The EU's WhatsApp case will influence who gets to place AI assistants in front of billions of users. Chile and Mexico's agreement shows emerging economies moving to secure both compute and governance capacity, not just importing AI from abroad. Corporate competition—Google versus OpenAI at the frontier, Meta versus independent providers in messaging, Mistral and Baidu as regional champions—is unfolding within these evolving policy frameworks. For practitioners and investors, the implication is clear: the race to more capable systems will continue, but the winners will be those that can navigate (or help set) the rules of access, interoperability, and responsibility as much as they can train larger or smarter models.
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