AI Is a Product of Humanity. Humanity Should Own AI.
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AI Is a Product of Humanity. Humanity Should Own AI.<br>ByCecilia Rikap<br>Big Tech has looted humanity’s creative output to create artificial intelligence. We don’t just deserve a share of AI’s profits — we deserve control over it.
AI was built on the creative output of the entire world. The profits are flowing to a handful of American billionaires. (Abhishek Chinnappa / Getty Images)<br>Our summer issue is out now. Get a discounted subscription to our print magazine today.
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Elon Musk is officially the richest man on Earth. The source of his wealth is not his own cunning. Nor can it be fully explained by capitalism’s financial architecture, tax loopholes, and the value created by the workers employed in his various ventures.<br>Tech billionaires’ companies are robbing humanity of its distinctive capacity to create. From social media data to academic outputs, literary pieces, artwork, movies, music, podcasts, software code, our health care records, you name it: generative AI models are trained on creative products from around the world. Once operational, data retrieved from user prompts is used to fine-tune them, improving AI’s predictive capacities. AI is, unmistakably, a product of humanity.<br>Bernie Sanders’ call for levying a one-time 50 percent tax on AI companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI — to be paid in stock — is, seen from this perspective, a reasonable compensatory measure.
There are even more compelling reasons to justify shared ownership. AI models are cocreated by the many and then monetized by the few. The very conception of AI models and their underlying technologies rely on a global network of scientists and engineers based at universities, public research organizations, and thousands of companies at least partially funded by taxpayers’ money. These actors profit very little, if they profit at all, and have virtually no say in what models are developed or how.<br>Elsewhere, I have shown how Microsoft and Google dictate the agenda of the frontier AI research global community. These and other giants like Meta do open-source-washing. They open-source strategic software pieces — sometimes using a form of pseudo-open-source — to turn them into de facto standards. Massive adoption leads to a captured user base, one that will more easily consume other bits of their technology — these kept as proprietary software. Big Tech companies’ additional strategy to control technology and other organizations beyond ownership has made the headlines. They are the largest corporate venture capitalists, investing in thousands of start-ups to get access to and steer their developments. This is how companies like OpenAI and Anthropic came to be.<br>Bernie’s diagnosis is correct: AI is indeed a product of humanity ripped off by a few corporate giants. But he falls into a nationalist trap that has even led the Financial Times to associate him with Donald Trump when suggesting that Americans should own half of AI companies’ stocks. The creative products used for training, as well as researchers, developers, and start-ups integrating Big Tech’s controlled networks are not only American. They come from around the world. The AI sovereign wealth fund should thus belong to the true public, to the world’s population.
Geography is only one of the reasons why the scope of Bernie’s proposal matters. If the aim is to grant humanity both ownership of benefits and control over the development of AI models, getting a cut of the AI companies going for initial public offerings this year would be far from enough. The ultimate AI steersmen and main beneficiaries are Nvidia and the cloud giants. Every single AI model can be used as a service on at least one of the world’s largest tech supermarkets, aka Amazon, Microsoft, and Google clouds. Using AI means using their clouds. AI adoption takes place through their clouds. The more models are released, the more cloud giants’ predatory ecosystems expand. And while cloud giants also develop their own models, start-ups depend on Amazon, Microsoft, and Google infrastructures and cloud marketplaces. From known dependencies, like OpenAI’s reliance on Microsoft Azure, to DeepSeek and xAI’s Grok.<br>And it is precisely their clouds’ data centers that complete the spoilage. This represents an extraction of nature that compounds the appropriation of data and knowledge. Their expansion should be regulated, and society should also be compensated for their use of land, energy, and drinking water. An international AI sovereign wealth fund could compensate for this twin extractivism of...