The fastest way to catch the AI frontier turned out to be buying the company that grades it. Scale AI's core business was preparing training data and running evals for the top labs. OpenAI, Google, and the rest paid Scale to label the data their flagship models learned from, and Scale's SEAL leaderboards ranked the results. One vendor, sitting in the middle, watching what every frontier lab fed its models and how each one measured progress. In June 2025, Meta paid $14.3 billion for 49% of…