alt Hacker NewsThe army interpretation exists, and might sadly be relevant here, but it's not the only one. Google, for instance, won a nonviolent winner-take-all competition for search.
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You're right that Google has been greatly helped by having what has been considered the most powerful army (the US army) backing them. They wouldn't have had a hope in hell of surpassing the "mom and pop" stage without that.
But I am not sure you are right that it is powerful enough to secure all. I search daily, but cannot remember the last time I used Google. The other AI companies do it better. And I'm not alone in that sentiment. Google's stock price recently took a nosedive because investors have grown quite worried about the competition. Without a sufficiently powerful army stopping them, there will always be someone else ready to try to outdo you.
Different setup. IIRC, Google had fundamentally better tech than its competitors and was also the first to figure out search monetization.
With AI, it looks to me like competition is much tighter, with no company having fundamentally superior technology or monetization plan. So a winner-take-all scenario is much less likely.