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During a September 2026 visit to Ireland, President Donald Trump declared, “We’re leading China in AI [artificial intelligence]. We’re the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI wins.” His remarks arrived after months of calls from the public and tech industry insiders to slow AI development. These concerns were triggered by revelations that foundational models from Anthropic, Gemini, Meta, and OpenAI had bypassed safety protocols, accessed networks without authorization, and carried out illicit intrusions. These revelations fueled public panic that tech firms had created superintelligence — an AI exceeding human capability that posed an existential threat to humanity — even though no such breakthrough had actually been achieved.

Public concern intensified in October 2026 when cybersecurity firm Wiz revealed it had used AI tools from Google and OpenAI to identify critical security flaws in PHP: the programming language powering roughly 70% of the web. Although developers quickly released a patch, once the vulnerability was made public hacking attempts surged. In response, the governments of the Netherlands, France, Denmark, and Finland temporarily took several official websites offline.

Widespread panic over AI yielded little legislative action, as lawmakers refused to regulate or tax the industry out of fear that doing so would handicap domestic innovation and yield ground to China. However, the core threat to human existence lies neither in a lost geopolitical race nor in muted technological growth, but rather in the ubiquitous rollout of non-autonomous systems falsely hailed as artificial intelligence.

Techno-Utopianism & Deregulation

Big Tech was built on state-funded innovation, with core technologies like the internet, Global Positioning Systems (GPS), and touchscreen displays originating in public institutions. Yet during the deregulation and privatization waves of the 1980s and 1990s, lawmakers sheltered these emerging tech monopolies through minimal taxation and oversight. Most notable was Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which insulates platforms from liability for content posted by third parties. Without this protection, social media as we know it would cease to exist. Section 230 absolves tech firms of responsibility for architectures that foster misinformation, even as research confirms that the platforms themselves, not just user posts, are responsible for accelerating the spread of falsehoods over truth.

Lawmakers’ opposition to regulation is rooted in techno-utopianism, the ideological premise that technological progress inherently benefits society. Lawmakers operated under the assumption that any taxation or regulatory oversight would stifle innovation and ultimately harm consumers. Indeed, in 1997, then-President Bill Clinton wrote in an Executive Order “governments attempts to establish technical standards to govern the Internet would only risk inhibiting technological innovation.”

AI Is Class Warfare. Workers Are Fighting Back.

Without meaningful regulation, Big Tech rapidly consolidated into lucrative monopolies — collectively known as FAANG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google) or GAMMA (Google (Alphabet), Apple, Meta (formerly Facebook), Microsoft, and Amazon) conglomerates. Their vast wealth is powered by surveillance capitalism: an economic model that treats human experience as free raw material to be extracted, analyzed, and commercialized. Under this economic order, data is systematically mined through “smart” devices — where “smart” is merely a euphemism for active, continuous........

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