glossary.

In an AI context, "lab" is shorthand for the companies and not-for-profits building frontier AI models: Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Meta, Mistral, xAI, DeepSeek, Alibaba, Moonshot AI, Z.ai, with a few smaller names too. "The labs." Small in number throughout the world and concentrated in the US and China currently. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google DeepMind are US labs, Mistral is positioned as Europe's Sovereign AI, and China has its own frontier labs (DeepSeek, Alibaba's Qwen and more) developing largely outside US chip supply chains. Barriers to entry include compute, access to talent, and access to funding (as creating and training frontier models uses a lot of all three). In a more academic setting, an AI lab can mean a group of researchers researching and developing AI, and they might be actively publishing journal articles in the field.