And who buys those troubled assets at deep discount? Where do they get the cash to pay for them?

The problem is, what assets remain of a company that doesn't own anything material? OpenAI, Anthropic - they don't own datacenters that could be auctioned off. All they own is training data and trained weights, and both are relatively worthless.

The game that all the AI companies are playing is to be the last dog standing at all costs, because that kind of dominance is a money printer.