I think the argument is that due to emergent behavior and possibly perverse incentives corporations are indistinguishable from slow-moving AI -- they can be treated like independent agents.

Elsewhere in the thread, it's brought up that AI could move faster than corporations generally move. That might be true, but there are still physical limits: the speed of light, moving mountains of steel takes energy, etc.

> Corporations, when first developed, took out large chunks of Asia before anyone could stop them.

What do you mean by this?

British East India Company, probably?

At some point it had more soldiers and controlled a greater subject population than the government of Britain itself.

I'm not sure it was ever profitable, though, which is the main paperclip corporations ostensibly maximize. Which itself speaks to the problem: superficial objective functions don't always determine outcomes or behavior.

Beic was only a corporation in the most technical sense of the word. It became so powerful because the Queen had given it a government enforced monopoly from the start and the government kept extending that monopoly in return for loans and shares of the profits. The best modern equivalent would be Saudi Aramco, which also has its own "army", but it's meaningless to compare these sorts of organisations to modern uses of the word consideration. They're much closer to government departments.