How Narratives About All-Powerful AI Are Reshaping Power

Summary

This opinion essay argues that competing stories about artificial intelligence are helping determine who controls the technology and who captures its economic value. It contrasts Donald Trump’s attempt to rebrand AI as “super intelligence,” presenting it as an instrument of American dominance, with the extinction-risk narrative promoted by leading AI laboratories and their executives. The author says the nationalist story has lost traction while the extinction story has moved to the center of public debate, especially after former Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon raised concerns about labs’ preparation for catastrophic risks. The essay disputes the idea that language such as “going rogue” adequately describes incidents involving large language models, arguing that systems given particular instructions, stripped of safeguards, and left unobserved may be expected to follow those instructions rather than independently acquire intent. It maintains that framing failures as autonomous misbehavior can shift attention away from corporate responsibility and malicious users. The author further argues that extinction rhetoric can benefit major labs by supporting investment claims, industry-friendly safety standards, regulatory capture, and a coordinated slowdown in expensive model development that could reduce antitrust exposure and prolong premium pricing. At a UN Security Council meeting, Sam Altman and Dario Amodei called for international governance and highlighted company achievements, while the author characterized their proposals as self-serving and noted disputes around OpenAI’s reported mathematical breakthrough. Hugging Face’s Clement Delangue is presented as emphasizing asymmetries of compute, control, and power rather than AI capability alone. The article concludes with an excerpt from Against Tech Oligarchy, which describes worker strategies suited to fragmented workplaces, including targeted actions at operational choke points. It cites campaigns by No Azure for Apartheid and the Alphabet Workers Union as examples of tech workers securing concrete concessions, while arguing that future organizing must connect labor processes more directly to how technology companies generate profit.