This Guardian opinion piece argues that artificial intelligence is poised to reshape capitalism itself, not just individual jobs, and frames the current US-China AI rivalry as a contest between two competing but equally hierarchical models of "info-capitalism." The author traces the idea of self-directed machines liberating society from labour and hierarchy back to Aristotle and Marx, noting that OpenAI's Dean Ball has accused China's open-source AI push of risking "full AI communism," while the writer sees it instead as a geopolitical counter-strategy rather than a genuine threat to capitalism.

The piece contrasts America's approach of hoarding computing power and locking users into US cloud services with China's open-source strategy, which lets users run models locally and aims to dominate downstream technologies like brain-machine interfaces and drone-based "low altitude economy." It further warns that large language models increasingly resemble Marx's "general intellect," capable of outperforming knowledge workers, and cites economist Philippe Aghion's concern that AI could sever the link between innovation and profit by making patents redundant, leaving society with a stark choice about how to steer the technology's development.