Corporations, when first developed, took out large chunks of Asia before anyone could stop them. The main difference is that corporations have to be powered by people while an AI could theoretically work with complete independence.
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.
What do you mean by this?
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 consistently 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.