No, I think it's reasonable to wonder whether some powerful enough agents have some "super secret tech" and aren't telling. It wouldn't be the first time. For instance, the US didn't exactly advertise having the atomic bomb before they first used it (although it was a very short time after and they did specifically work on the atomic bomb to use it as soon as possible).

That said, personally, I think it's unlikely.

First, the vast majority of AI research is happening out in the open. It's often funded by militaries (e.g. DARPA) but it's not owned by them directly, rather the owners are universities and similar.

Second, private corps promote their AI advances very aggressively and this marketing is a big part of the advantage they try to establish over their competitors, so it doesn't seem obvious why they would keep a new advance "under wraps". For example, what would Google do with a secret machine vision system capable of 20% better performance than that of its rivals? I can't tell.

Of course we can assume that Google or someome similar have a much more advanced system than anyone else, like a real AGI. We can imagine such a system sitting at the heart of Google, dirctly advice Larry and Sergey how to run the company. But then, if we can imagine that, we can imagine anything.

And I do mean anything:

https://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multive...

Well I do think it's very possible if not certain that they have unusually advanced systems that have been kept secret, but I would expect them to be in the areas they actually have data for.

As in security cameras, finances, cell tower data, etc. Facial and gait recognition, location tracking, etc. far beyond anything commercially available. But I'd doubt they have an AGI behind closed doors :P

Well actually if you look at the rest of what I said, it’s that if there were advanced systems hidden behind the curtain, transitional stages of said systems would have made their way into the public realm. You can’t just jump to something as massive as full blown AI and not have byproduct tech. Consider the space race for instance, and all the resulting byproduct techs it brought. So many inventions that were created along the way that made their way into the public realm. I find it difficult to believe that any other breakthrough of similar or greater magnitude would not do the same.