We keep calling them companies. The word does for a frontier AI lab roughly what "merchant" did for the East India Company in 1700: technically accurate, and almost entirely misleading.

In barely eighteen months these firms have negotiated compute deals nation by nation, wired themselves into the classified defense networks of great powers, restarted the most infamous nuclear plant in American history to feed their data centers, and written behavioral rulebooks now enforced against a population approaching a billion people. None of that is the work of a Delaware corporation. It is the work of a state.

We argue that the right name for what's emerging isn't "Big Tech" or "monopoly" but something older and stranger: the parastate, an entity that performs the functions of sovereignty while carrying none of its obligations. The last time the world produced creatures like this we called them company-states, and the way their stories ended should give us pause.