Big tech controls the direction and implementation of the affirmative – that necessitates AI is used in service of economic growth.

The AI industrial landscape is dominated by a small number of companies. Table 1 gives an overview of how much the value of each of these giants (GAFAM and BAT) has increased in the last decade. This table illustrates how the commodification of data, in combination with data extraction, made these companies extremely profitable. The top ten of most valuable companies in the world is now dominated by AI companies (Statista 2020). Their drive for expansion resulted in intense concentration, where each one of them has achieved a highly dominant position in the market (Kaplan and Haenlein 2020; Montes and Goertzel 2019). For example, Google obtained an (almost) monopoly over online search, Amazon and Alibaba over e-commerce and Facebook and Tencent over the US and Chinese markets of social networking.

The drive for growth of AI companies demonstrates that the problem of monopolisation is real: it creates a massive power concentration in the hands of a few players. The AI giants dominate the field and aggressively acquire potential competitors. We face a situation, where there are only a few AI behemoths, who own the expensive computational infrastructure, have access to vast amounts of data to train ML and DL models and can attract the highly skilled AI talent to develop new systems and services. The economic power, expressed in their rapidly increasing value, highlights the point of AI as a GPT creating winners and losers (Trajtenberg 2018). The AI giants are definitely the winners in this context.

Table 1 also illustrates that the COVID-19 pandemic has only accelerated the tendency of expansion and monopolisation. The value of the AI giants has grown exponentially since the start of the pandemic, as we are all massively dependent on their digital services. One of the risks of this domination is that these companies alone have the economic power to make political decisions about how AI is developed, how it is used and what its impact will be. It is an illustration of the winner-take-all scenario (Srnicek 2017). What is a source of concern is that the AI giants follow a strategy of enclosure, with the objective to maintaining their leading position and safeguarding their growth and profit. Enclosure entails that—after having achieved a monopolistic position—these AI companies move to control access to their data and limit the ability of users to switch to competitors, thereby enclosing more and more of the digital world within their private sphere (Couldry and Mejias 2019; Morozov 2018).

The enclosure by AI capitalism is clearly illustrated by OpenAI. Originally founded as a non-profit organisation, which would collaborate with other institutions and researchers and make their research open to the public, OpenAI is now dominated by corporate investors, including Microsoft, and is considered as one of the biggest competitors of DeepMind.

In this context, it becomes clear that we—as a society— need to reflect on this situation and come up with alternatives so to avoid we end up as losers, under the control of the winners, the AI giants. Only criticising the problems of AI capitalism, however, will not be enough. As a society, we need to start imagining what alternatives could challenge the power concentration of Big Tech. Critical political economy offers a framework to inquire about this.