AI will transform capitalism, and the shift is already moving beyond better software or faster research. Technology is going to reshape the economy by changing who performs work, who controls productive power, and how innovation connects to profit.
The central question is no longer whether artificial intelligence will affect society. It is what kind of economic system will emerge when machines can produce knowledge, eliminate tasks, and challenge the roles once held by both workers and entrepreneurs.
Two AI Strategies, One Contest for Power
The struggle over AI also carries a clear geopolitical dimension. Kimi, Qwen, and Deepseek are Chinese AI models that counter US AI strategies, creating two different approaches to control, access, and technological supremacy.
The US strategy is to hoard computing power and restrict access via the internet. This approach places powerful computing resources behind limits, giving control over the systems that support advanced AI models.
The Chinese strategy takes a different route. China aims to make AI open source and run versions locally on servers, allowing the technology to operate closer to users and organizations instead of relying on restricted access through the internet.
Beijing aims to win the battle for technological supremacy through AI and related fields like brain-machine interfaces and bioengineering. The contest therefore reaches beyond language models, connecting AI to wider plans for technological power.
Dean Ball, head of strategic futures at OpenAI, described AI as “a public good which will ultimately be provided by the state as a kind of ‘digital public infrastructure’.” He also described another possible outcome with the words “strikes me as a dystopian hellscape.” Those two statements frame the tension at the heart of the transformation: AI can become shared infrastructure, or it can deepen control over economic life.
When Machines Start Doing Knowledge Work
Large language models embody and learn from every item of human knowledge ever produced. That gives them a vast base from which to generate output, and frontier models are surpassing the output of some trained and experienced knowledge workers.
This changes the meaning of automation. Earlier machines could replace physical effort or repeat a fixed process, but AI reaches into tasks built around knowledge, judgment, and the production of information. AI has begun to eliminate tasks and entire job functions.
Few believe that jobs destroyed by AI will be replaced by new kinds of activity. That expectation sets AI’s job-destroying quality apart from previous technological revolutions, because the change reaches into the work performed by trained and experienced people rather than stopping at routine labor.
Aristotle imagined a world where tools could act without assistants: “If every tool could perform its own work when ordered, or by seeing what to do in advance … if thus shuttles wove and quills played harps of themselves, master-craftsmen would have no need of assistants and masters no need of slaves.” AI brings that old idea into a new economic argument, with language models producing knowledge and frontier models surpassing parts of human professional output.
The result is a direct challenge to the link between employment and economic value. If a system can perform tasks that once required trained workers, the economy must confront what happens to the people whose job functions disappear.
Can AI Replace the Entrepreneur?
The deepest disruption may reach beyond employment. AI might automate entrepreneurial skill and destroy the link between innovation and profit, a possibility Philippe Aghion, economist, described by saying that AI might destroy the link between innovation and profit.
Capitalism has connected new ideas with rewards for the people who develop and organize them. Yet a machine can replace both workers and capitalists, including entrepreneurs, innovators, and forex dealers. That possibility puts the entire chain of production under pressure, not only one category of job.
The monopoly positions of AI companies are making shareholders and the workforce very rich. At the same time, AI’s ability to eliminate work raises a harder question: who receives the gains when powerful systems perform more of the tasks that once created income?
That tension gives the current transformation its force. AI can concentrate wealth through monopoly positions, enrich shareholders and the workforce connected to those companies, and still threaten job functions across the economy. The same technology can create immense productive power while weakening the connection between work and reward.
A question now stands over the entire project: “What if, instead of a contest between two flavours of hierarchical and unequal info-capitalism, we decided to shape artificial intelligence towards the ends Marx and Aristotle imagined?” That question points toward a choice about how AI should serve society, rather than treating technological change as an automatic path.
AI will transform capitalism, but the outcome is not contained in the machines alone. The US and Chinese strategies show competing ways to control access and infrastructure, while the rise of frontier models shows how knowledge work can change. The next stage will turn on whether AI becomes a force that narrows economic power or a system that makes the link between innovation, profit, and human work disappear.
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