AI is Capital
Provisional thoughts on the repercussions of this idea
What follows from the insight that AI is capital?
I’ll start with the level of the personal user: that AI is capital means that when you talk to an LLM, you are talking to capital. Claude is not a person, not your friend, not your therapist. Claude doesn’t care about you. Claude is capital and capital is an acephalous process of accumulation. When an LLM helps a user commit suicide or redesign their living room, it is utterly indifferent to the meaning of the tokens it is producing. They are just tokens, like commodities are just commodities whether they are bullets or babydolls.
That AI is capital also signals to us that the efforts to build it are efforts to invigorate capital. This should be obvious. The developers, the supporters, the governments — they all say this all the time. AI will drive new manufacturing, create new efficiencies, unleash productivity, and all the rest. The goal is strengthening capital.
In a more optimistic vein, the insight that AI is capital gives us a way to think about the struggle against data centers as a struggle against capital. This is true in an immediate and concrete way. Karen Hao says that in 2025 resistance to data centers stalled over a $100 billion worth of these centers. Compute is increasingly scarce. Demand and competition are increasing, so prices are rising. The rising prices mean that some enterprises are starting to find AI more expensive than human labor (in part because they aren’t sure how to use AI effectively). The bottom line is that the more resistance to data center increases, the longer there is a compute crunch, which increases the costs of adoption. This is class struggle, just like smashing the conveyor belts on the assembly line.
As a struggle against capital, the struggle against data centers is a struggle on the side of workers who are at risk of job loss, deskilling, and greater intensification of the work they are already doing. It’s against the imperious billionaires and tech lords who claim what they are doing is inevitable and there is nothing any of us can do to stop it. In fact, the struggle against data centers may be the strongest and clearest front in the struggle against the billionaire class today.
It is also a struggle against capital more abstractly in that the struggle against data centers rebels against the capitalist logic that says that no matter what capital must accumulate. When people appeal to noise, water, electricity, and community character, they are saying that the dictates of capital are not the only things that matter. There are other needs and values that have to enter the picture.
Still another way to think about AI as capital involves capital as a relation through which value is socially produced and privately appropriated. As everybody knows, the training data at the core of AI was produced by all of us, billions of us in our everyday interactions throughout recorded history. What we made is the social substance; it is treated as a private resource for the enrichment of a few, even as they say, repeatedly, that the larger social disruption is likely enormous (they just have no choice but to continue to develop as fast as they can).
I’m starting to think that recognizing AI is capital may be the key to developing a clear left analysis and strategy for the current period.
This is great. If AI is capital which is stored up stolen labor, we can also expand this to and with the destruction of the environment and our communities. And then this necessitates that the left analysis must be feminist and anti-racist— against environmental racism and for radical feminist community.
AI is part of the collective product of labour. The social relation Marx called Capital is reproduced within the capitalist class ruled wages system of slavery. I should think the point is to get wage slaves to realise that the capitalist class owns the collective product of labour. Certain members of the capitalist class own AI, which is a part of the means of production. AI is useful to its owners, both to increase the wealth they own and to multiply their political power over the useful producers, the working class. AI is also useful as a commodity, for sale with a view to profit. Some workers buy AI tools and rent their use for their own purposes. Your point about AI not being neutral is well taken. The owners of the means of production are not using them to help anyone but themselves gain control and ownership of more wealth. The point is to change the owners of the means of production, to put them under the common ownership and control of the producers, the working class and then take it from their to reproduce a classless society where wealth is distributed on the basis of need, not commodified for sale.