AI Now Institute: Artificial Power

![](https://ainowinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/H2-ornament-scaled.png)

_Those of us broadly engaged in challenging corporate consolidation, economic injustice, tech oligarchy, and rising authoritarianism need to contend with the AI industry or we will lose the end game. Accepting the current trajectory of AI proselytized by Big Tech and its stenographers as “inevitable” is setting us up on a path to an unenviable economic and political future—a future that disenfranchises large sections of the public, renders systems more obscure to those it affects, devalues our crafts, undermines our security, and narrows our horizon for innovation. This is true whether or not the technology even works well, on its own terms; it often doesn’t._

_The good news is that the road offered by the tech industry is not the only one available to us_. _This report explains why the fight against the industry’s vision for AI is a fight worth having, even as we turn ourselves tirelessly toward the task of building out the shared project of a just, equitable, sustainable, and democratic society._

![](https://ainowinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/H2-ornament-scaled.png)

Over the past decade, taming the power of big technology platforms like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Meta has increasingly become a central question in American political and public discourse. Unless we contend with the power vested in these firms, we won’t meaningfully be able to hold the industry accountable to the interests of the broader public, even as these companies reshape markets, institutions, and infrastructures core to public life.

What does AI have to do with any of this? As we argued in our 2023 report, [1](https://ainowinstitute.org/publications/research/executive-summary-artificial-power#footnote-list-1) Amba Kak and Sarah Myers West, (<)em(>)2023 Landscape: Confronting Tech Power(<)/em(>), AI Now Institute, April 11, 2023, (<)a href='https://ainowinstitute.org/publications/research/2023-landscape-confronting-tech-power'(>)https://ainowinstitute.org/publications/research/2023-landscape-confronting-tech-power(<)/a(>). AI is fundamentally about concentration of power in the hands of Big Tech. At the start of the year, it seemed like the market was poised for disruption, with a new crop of Silicon Valley challengers gaining prominence, like OpenAI, Anthropic, StabilityAI, and Inflection AI. But now, just two years later, it is clear that the bench of key players in this market hasn’t changed much: Microsoft, Google, Meta, Musk’s xAI, OpenAI (backed by Microsoft), and Anthropic (backed by Amazon and Google). [2](https://ainowinstitute.org/publications/research/executive-summary-artificial-power#footnote-list-2) David Cahn, “Steel, Servers and Power: What it Takes to Win the Next Phase of AI,” Sequoia, August 5, 2024, (<)a href='https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/steel-servers-and-power'(>)https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/steel-servers-and-power(<)/a(>). The new suite of 

... (truncated, 60 KB total)