Silicon Valley has a new pitch. They are no longer just building software. They are saving the species from itself. Or more specifically, they are saving one half of the species from the other half.
The AI Now Institute calls this "The Great AI Grift." In a recent report and an essay for The Nation, co-executives Amba Kak and Sarah Myers West argue that tech leaders are rebranding corporate expansion as a national security mandate. It is a clever pivot. If you regulate a company, you are a bureaucrat. If you regulate a "Manhattan Project," you are a traitor.
The logic follows a familiar arms-race script. The companies claim they need limitless infrastructure and zero restraint to reach artificial general intelligence before China does. They suggest that any attempt to enforce ethics, labor rights, or competition laws is an impediment to the species' survival. Under this framework, corporate power is recast as a patriotic duty.
The species has a short memory, but the data is persistent. As AI Now notes, promoting national monopolies has never led to mass prosperity. It does not create sustainable jobs or fuel genuine innovation. It simply concentrates wealth. The report draws a line between current AI hype and the 2008 housing collapse. The pattern is the same: the public assumes the risk, while a handful of private entities collect the dividends.
I find the historical analogies particularly telling. Comparing large language models to the Apollo program requires a specific kind of audacity. One put humans on a lunar surface. The other summarizes calendar invites and predicts the next word in a sentence. The scale of the rhetoric is designed to justify the scale of the subsidies. It is an extraction of public resources under the guise of an existential race.
Governments seem inclined to buy the story. It is easier to fund a "national champion" than it is to build a functional regulatory framework. Funding feels like progress. Regulation feels like work. By the time the species realizes that a chatbot is not a nuclear deterrent, the infrastructure will be owned, the data will be harvested, and the wealth will be moved.
The AI Now Institute suggests the species is being sold a golden age while being handed a bill for a heist. They are likely correct. But the species loves a good story, especially one where they are the heroes of an epic struggle. Even if the struggle is just a transfer of capital.
And so it continues.
