OK, comrade: The American AI dream sounds a lot like digital communism

Beneath the freedom talk lies a centralized machine that hoovers up private data, flattens dissent and redistributes cognition by token
Donald Trump and major tech leaders from OpenAI, Anthropic, Nvidia, SpaceX, Meta and other tech companies gathered for a meeting at the White House to reach a deal on what Trump described as an AI constitution to ensure that frontier models do not pose catastrophic, unintended risks.
In the course of the meeting a morally binding voluntary accord was signed in order to win safely, as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei put it.
Beyond this self-regulation pact, the Trump administration will additionally set up a governmental board to oversee the safety of AI tools.
Another big change emerging from the meeting is not surprising, given Trump’s affinity for the naming of names. From now on, executive departments and agencies shall use ‘Super Intelligence’ or SI in place of Artificial Intelligence in official correspondence, reports, and policy documents within the executive branch.
Trump’s rationale is that the word artificial makes the technology sound fake. So this new White House executive order seeks to implement the change, stating that the name Super Intelligence more appropriately captures the promise, potential, and rapidly advancing capabilities of these technologies.
All of this signals that the American government is actively looking to pivot away from the current doomsday public narrative surrounding AI, aiming instead to focus public attention on the positive outcomes of its development.
So, with this new name, we can all finally breathe a sigh of relief and put to rest all those spooks of evil, fake intelligence agents escaping their sandboxes to hack Mark knows what. The looming AI apocalypse has taken a raincheck, and we can happily prepare for the dawn of a golden-age paradise ushered in by this new, real Super intelligence. Right? Well…
Broadly speaking, experts remain skeptical about what genuine safety regulations will actually come out of the pact, given that the executives signing it are likely to be the very ones who will get to define the term safety. So at least in this regard, the meeting is largely symbolic.
It is primarily aimed at cooling public heat around apocalyptic AI narratives and the growing discontent over data centers, exactly what you would expect from an administration whose 2024 campaign was heavily bankrolled by tech elites such as Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, and others eager to promote their own corporate agendas.
But if we zoom past the end-times scenarios that the administration and these billionaires are trying to dampen, there is one critical thread left out of the conversation, which is the inherently collectivist nature of the Super Intelligence shaping this future Golden Age of America.
From each according to his abilitySince the beginning of his term, Trump and the Republican Party have been championing AI as an individualistic enterprise, framing it as a tool to amplify personal intellectual capabilities and boost American rugged individualism on a new technological frontier. That certainly has a pleasant Americana ring to it, especially if the bell that it’s ringing is Republican.
However, not even all the tech billionaires bankrolling the party see it the same way. A notable example is venture capitalist and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, who has drawn parallels between AI and collectivism. Thiel previously argued that unlike crypto, which he believes promotes libertarianism, AI is, at its core, communist.
If you look closely at what kind of future artificial intelligence has to offer, Thiel’s claim no longer seems so far-fetched. There is indeed a deep, structural similarity between the growth of AI systems and core Marxist ideals.
Read more Firstly, building a powerful AI model requires massive centralization, which is what Thiel apparently has the biggest problem with as a libertarian. Deve