Punctuated Equilibria in Artificial Intelligence: The Institutional Scaling Law and the Speciation of Sovereign AI

ArXi:2603.14664v1 Announce Type: new The dominant narrative of artificial intelligence development assumes that progress is continuous and that capability scales monotonically with model size. We challenge both assumptions. Drawing on punctuated equilibrium theory from evolutionary biology, we show that AI development proceeds not through smooth advancement but through extended periods of stasis interrupted by rapid phase transitions that reorganize the competitive landscape.