One thing that bothers me is that if the AI maximalism turns out correct (which is needed to justify the valuations), why would AI companies respect money and ownership?

So far, even major disruptions were still affecting relatively small segments of the economy. Car lobby in Germany, tech in the US, "Big Pharma/Food/etc”. They needed the rest of the economy.

But if some AI company figures out a way to monopolize everything: new companies, old companies, physical manufacturing - all the things they say they will, please buy here for lots of money - why would they be bound to pay out dividends or otherwise share the fruits of their economic labour?

I’m not saying specifically Anthropic would be looking to screw its investors. Rather, if you control an almost omnipotent genie, wouldn’t the temptation just be too much?

Or temptation aside - will money even have any value? If some AI company rebuilds the economy from scratch, and control everything from accounting to shoe making, why would they respect the value of some fiat tokens? It’d be like the conquistadors respecting the shells and beads of their new Aztec subjects.

Of course, perhaps none of this happens, but then the question is, how good an investment all of this even is.

Agree 100%

The value of money, and the ability for average people to have influence on future events, ultimately is tied to the fact that the labor of an average person has inherent value.

Once that is no longer true, all bets are off: All promises of compensation become meaningless, and it's easy for those in power to rationalize to themselves why they no longer are beholden to their earlier promises. They will say to themselves "The situation ended up more nuanced than we expected"

(Which is exactly what Google said in February 2025 when they reneged on their pledge not to use their AI for military applications)

Because even companies that did have monopolies on the most essential parts of the economy couldn't do everything and capture everything. A monopoly on intelligence is still constrained by the physical world in which we exist, if it's run by people then they are constrained by their own nature and by the other people that still hold other forms of real power. Society might not be able to function without them but that doesn't automatically mean they are in charge, they exist within that society so if they destroy it then they destroy themselves not to mention the intense opposition they would face if they attempted to do so.

I certainly feel like AI maximalism is the only way it all maths up. There is a bit that Matt Levine writes about AI companies, and you touch on basically the same points, that roughly goes "you are an AI company and you are making the god-computer. Why would you focus on anything else because if you're successful you could basically generate infinite money? Turns out to make the god-computer you need a lot of money upfront."[1]

So perhaps they would only respect money and property up to the point that it's necessary.

The more realist answer is that they will keep respecting money and property as capital works to reinforce the status quo and enrich shareholders. You think just because you can do your job faster--or completely--with a machine that you have to work less? Hardly! Now this is where interesting policy questions spring up but I digress.

https://archive.is/20251015175242/https://www.bloomberg.com/...

> if you control an almost omnipotent genie

I think this is the major hole in the argument, and in the "AI maximalism" position you present. There is no such thing as an omnipotent genie, or a magic eight ball that can answer any question. Any technology has limitations, and if you assume as a premise that the technology does not have meaningful limitations (or that the limitations are irrelevant, which is really what you said), the conclusions you draw will also make no sense. This is how you get nonsensical ideas like the singularity.

Somebody else asked this very eloquently: If AGI is here, why does OpenAI need us to prompt it? They could just go and tell it "make as much money as possible" or "make Sam Altman God Emperor of Mankind" and it would go do that. It would not need any of our ideas or guidance.

As long as they're still looking for prompting customers, they're clearly not there yet. There is some solace in that.

> why would they be bound to pay out dividends or otherwise share the fruits of their economic labour?

because they don't control the physical paper that is money.

I dont understand what you mean by "fiat tokens". I don't imagine most people will accept tokens as a currency because they are as good hold of value and predictable as bitcoin.

In a token economy, certainly what you say is a possibility, but as you can imagine, that economy will be unsustainable so back to "regular" money.

https://www.thirdrisk.org

You have to wonder how many people in AI leadership positions are already making decisions based on this expected outcome.

Keep it up because your line of thinking is on the right track. Finally some people are starting to ask the right questions on HN.

I think you need to go a step further. If AI maximalism turns out to be correct, does Anthropic control AI? Does the AI care that Anthropic as a company is supposed to be returning value to shareholders, or will it have its own agenda?

There are many at Anthropic and other labs who do in fact think this way. In a true AI maximalist world the stock market would be crashing due to the value of future cash flows being obliterated. So in a sense AI maximalism isn't needed to justify these valuations, it's almost the opposite.

The AI maximalism needed to justify these valuations isn’t “Anthropic takes over the world”, but simply that AI becomes a core part of corporate workflows.

If Microsoft Windows and Office can have a valuation in the trillions then Claude eventually working its way to the same ballpark isn’t a crazy assumption.

They don't need to monopolize everything to justify a valuation of $1.5 trillion. That's still relatively normal company territory. Not even top 10.

If Anthropic has an "omnipotent genie" why would they sell it to other people?

In this scenario, no one seems to talk about how, way before the end, AI tanks the value of thought work far before they take over other industries. Or even more extreme, the total collapse of white collar work...

Doesn't that factor into the future revenue? Feels like people imagine suddenly fully owning the means of production in a vibrant economy but how does that really make sense?

Without being facetious: Having an AI control the economy sounds like a planned economy. From San Francisco. Which makes the old meme about Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism sound like a prophecy.

If the economy is planned based on datasets, which are inherently backward looking then our best option is our ability to surprise. But that’s for the artists and philosophers to figure out.

> if the AI maximalism turns out correct (which is needed to justify the valuations)

AI maximalism is a Silicon Valley religion. You don't need anything close to it for some of these valuations to work. (Anthropic would be worth ~$500bn at Google's IPO multiple on revenue [1]. Anthropic is currently growing 6x faster.)

To be clear, I think these valuations are rich. But the notion that AI maximalism is required to sustain them is just false. $1.5tn sits comfortably on about $60bn of earnings, which with Anthropic's gross margins requires on the order of hundred of billions of dollars of revenue. That's super ambitious. But not Anthropic is the economy ambitious.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50247011

[2] https://www.multpl.com/s-p-500-pe-ratio

If you weren’t investing you were going to be poor even without AI.

AI maximalism doesn't mean an omnipotent genie, regardless of anyone's AGI/ASI/foom fantasy.

"AI" doesn't pump/treat sewage or drinking water, grow crops, mine metals, change wound dressings, deliver babies, stock grocery stores, drill teeth, walk dogs...

It's not the replicator from Star Trek!

Your question gets to the heart of who or what a company "is." If you don't pay dividends to your shareholders, what are you doing with all of your profits? I suppose they could just tell their investors to pound sand and pour it all back into the company, but part of the AI maximalist theory is that costs will approach 0, so it's not clear what they'd even need the money for. I guess Dario could raise his own salary to infinity trillion dollars, but he is accountable to a board of directors (and a trust in this case), so that seems like it's out.

Really the only scenario where Anthropic could screw over its investors in the way you're describing is if it could also take over the legal system and modify its own contractual obligations. Which, I mean, I guess anything is possible if we are in AI maximalist-land. But "AI is the law now" would be a much bigger story than "investors frustrated with low dividends."

Indeed,

The closer you get to the real or plausible "omnipotent genie", why would the person in possession of such a thing respect the rights of the formal owner - and why the engineers and operations managers respect the right of the management - this along with the question why the maybe-conscious super-intelligent machine itself would respect the rest of the hierarchy?

For now, these structures actually need massive resource inputs and that doesn't look to change soon but naturally one should be on look-out for the possibility of the tide shifting.

I mean there are a lot of paradoxes around AI. The chief two among which are:

1. the goal of ai is to end capitalism by disrupting scarcity in economics

2. if ai can build a closed system that prints ai factories, the 99% of humanity essentially are just genetic diversity live stock.

I was looking for the risk of "If we succeed to the extent proposed by our founders money may be of little functional purpose".

Lots of other fun risks (highly recommend checking that section) but not that one :(

I don't understand all you wrote, but I guess you are saying AI leads to communism, so what happens to the investors money in a communist economy?

And this is why "AI" and especially aAI* is the most dangerous tech in the world.

We don't have democracy because somebody thought it was fair or just for people to rule themselves. We have democracy because in the past, people got angry, picked up rifles and shot enough authoritarians (and their submissives!) for the rest of them to understand the group with more people has more firepower and tends to win.

So now we periodically check which group has more people with ballots instead of bullets.*

With autonomous drones and robots, democracy stops being the local optimum.

And once we slide (are pushed off) into a new more stable state (pun not intended), we won't have the (fire)power to get out of it.

* actual AI, which does exactly what it should correctly, not a statistical model of behavioral patterns

* but indirect democracy is expressing a point in n-dimensional space (your opinion) by selecting one of a predefined set of points (parties/politicians available) - which is stupid - and the cracks are already starting to show as e.g. nobody wants more surveillance, yet we keep getting more of it in both EU and US

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The "permanent disempowerment" people keep talking about won't be a "rogue" model, it'll be doing exactly what told by the rich and connected.

You're describing the thesis of the 1930s Techocracy movement [0], of which AI maximallism and EA are direct ideological successors. The original Technocrats (Musks grandpa for example [1]) argued that the "Price System", i.e. things like money and private ownership was an inefficient bottleneck that aught to be discarded in favour of scientific planning and energy accounting managed by technical experts.

EA-aligned AI labs share this exact ethos. In their view, fiat money and equity markets are merely temporary scaffolding used to raise capital until AGI is achieved. Once a central superintelligence controls manufacturing, software, and logistics, resource distribution shifts from market supply-and-demand to algorithmic optimization.

[0] https://digital.library.cornell.edu/catalog/ss:34227574

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_N._Haldeman?hl=en-GB

I would say they their, and OoenAI, mission is to bring humanity to the next level by sharing everything they have! /s