On his second day in office this year, President Trump underscored his unequivocal support for the tech industry. Standing at a lectern next to tech leaders, he announced the Stargate Project, a plan to pump $500 billion in private investment over four years into artificial intelligence infrastructure. For comparison: The Apollo mission, which sent the first men to the moon, spent around $300 billion in today’s dollars over 13 years. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, played down the investment. “It sounds crazy big now,” he said. “I bet it won’t sound that big in a few years.”
In the decade that I have observed Silicon Valley — first as an engineer, then as a journalist — I’ve watched the industry shift to a new paradigm. Tech companies have long reaped the benefits of a friendly U.S. government, but the Trump administration has made clear that it will now grant new firepower to the industry’s ambitions. The Stargate announcement was just one signal. Another was the Republican tax bill that the House passed last week, which would prohibit states from regulating A.I. for the next 10 years.
The leading A.I. giants are no longer merely multinational corporations; they are growing into modern-day empires. With the full support of the federal government, soon they will be able to reshape most spheres of society as they please, from the political to the economic to the production of science.
When I took my first job in Silicon Valley 10 years ago, the industry’s wealth and influence were already expanding. The tech giants had grandiose missions — take Google’s, to “organize the world’s information” — which they used to attract young workers and capital investment. But with the promise of developing artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., those grandiose missions have turned into civilizing ones. Companies claim they will bring humanity into a new, enlightened age — that they alone have the scientific and moral clarity to control a technology that, in their telling, will usher us to hell if China develops it first. “A.I. companies in the U.S. and other democracies must have better models than those in China if we want to prevail,” said Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic, an A.I. start-up.
This language is as far-fetched as it sounds, and Silicon Valley has a long history of making promises that never materialize. Yet the narrative that A.G.I. is just around the corner and will usher in “massive prosperity,” as Mr. Altman has written, is already leading companies to accrue large amounts of capital, lay claim to data and electricity and build enormous data centers that are accelerating the climate crisis. These gains will fortify tech companies’ power and erode human rights long after the shine of the industry’s promises wears off.
The quest for A.G.I. is giving companies cover to vacuum up more data than ever before, with profound implications for people’s privacy and intellectual property rights. Before investing heavily in generative A.I., Meta had amassed data from nearly four billion accounts, but it no longer considers that enough. To train its generative A.I. models, the company has scraped the web with little regard for copyright and even considered buying up Simon & Schuster to meet the new data imperative.