Today Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg joined the chorus of multi-billionaires who feel compelled to issue periodic manifestos about the impact of AI on society. Unlike Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, who posts on his own site, or Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who recently posted a long form manifesto on X, Zuckerberg took a page from his board colleague Marc Andreessen and issued his proclamation in the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal.
In “The AI Future Is for Everyone,” Zuckerberg broadly aligns himself with Nadella (and by extension, Palantir CEO Alex Karp), both of whom have recently warned that the frontier labs (Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic) can not be trusted with the power they seem to be accruing.
Will AI “be centralized and restricted to a few institutions,” Zuckerberg asks, “or will it be a tool that empowers everyone?”
Zuckerberg answers his own question with a predictable blend of libertarian and populist rhetoric: “I propose a philosophy based on individual empowerment as the source of prosperity, invention as the primary purpose of superintelligence, and balance of power as the foundation of safety,” he writes. “Therefore the best approach is letting people decide what matters to them.”
I’m sure nobody – not Sam Altman, not Satya Nadella, not the leadership of Apple or Anthropic or Google or Amazon – would disagree with Zuckerberg’s insipid sentiments. Is anyone opposed to “individual empowerment and choice”?
Of course not. But what they are opposed to is losing their customer base. OpenAI is approaching one billion monthly users. Anthropic has the entire software industry cowed. Combined, they represent the single greatest threat to the tech industry’s hegemony. That has everyone spooked.
The debate raging throughout Silicon Valley is being painted as geopolitical (we can’t let China win!), as existential (unfettered superintelligence will destroy humanity!), and as economic (data centers and billionaires are taking our jobs and stealing our future!). All of these issues are worthy of debate and action. But the recent bloviation from tech CEOs really comes down to one simple question: In a future dominated by AI, who will own the customer?
The past two decades of technology history has seen an unprecedented concentration of power into the hands of just a few technology companies. Seen in this light, the rise of OpenAI and Anthropic offer a coda of sorts: What if two relative newcomers burst onto the scene and execute big tech’s playbook better than anyone else? What if they end up with all the customers?!
Seen in this light, it’s no surprise that Zuckerberg believes Meta is the appropriate surface for, as he puts it, “delivering personal superintelligence to everyone.” The creator of the world’s most successful walled garden and owner of Instagram argues without a trace of irony that “humanity isn’t a monoculture.”
I’m pretty sure that the CEO of Apple, itself a monoculture, would make the same argument: clearly the iPhone is the best “surface for delivering superintelligence.” And of course the CEO of Microsoft believes the same holds true for Office365 and Windows and Azure. Google? Well duh, you should get your superintelligence from Google Search, Workspace, and Cloud. Ask any big tech CEO who should own the customer – including Sam Altman and Dario Amodei – and their answers will be the same: “We should!”
But what if the answer could be “no one should?”
Zuckerberg and his peers love to claim that AI will empower individuals and deliver an optimistic future, but only if we all access AI in the same way we’ve learned use social media, workspace applications, and search. Put another way, big tech wants to layer AI on top of its current business model. That model has been minting money for decades. Why change it?
But there is tantalizing possibility that no leader in big tech will endorse in a Wall Street Journal OpEd: That AI just might return power to ordinary citizens through a distributed, decentralized set of technologies similar in scope and architecture to the original personal computer and the early open web. This approach would treat “purchasing AI” as similar to owning a car, or a computer, or any other useful tool that grants its owner autonomy and freedom from the economics of enclosure. What if “intelligence” wasn’t considered a service delivered by Apple, Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic or Google, but rather a human right like water, electricity, education, or roads? Put another way, what if we imagined AI as a public good?
If we’re truly looking for revolutionary thinking about how AI impacts society, we should explore the one idea no one in big tech wants to touch: That maybe, just maybe, we’ve invented something the private markets shouldn’t control.
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