> Why do I think this? Personally, I believe it's painfully obvious that once private AI organizations come anywhere near something resembling AGI, they'll get taken over/nationalized by their respective national governments/armed forces.

I think unless it's specifically created in-house by the US Government (and classified), it won't really matter. The cat will be out of the bag at that point, and the technology used to create it will be known and public. Likely the only thing giving first movers an advantage from subsequent competitors is cost. Just look how long it took after DALLE2 before we had Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, both of which are arguably better than DALLE2. Sure, we're probably talking about a different scale, but I don't think a few billion dollars would get in the way of Google, Facebook, Microsoft all developing one, let alone the Chinese government.