They don't need to monopolize everything to justify a valuation of $1.5 trillion. That's still relatively normal company territory. Not even top 10.

Agree 100%

The value of money, and the ability for average people to have influence on future events, ultimately is tied to the fact that the labor of an average person has inherent value.

Once that is no longer true, all bets are off: All promises of compensation become meaningless, and it's easy for those in power to rationalize to themselves why they no longer are beholden to their earlier promises. They will say to themselves "The situation ended up more nuanced than we expected"

(Which is exactly what Google said in February 2025 when they reneged on their pledge not to use their AI for military applications)

I certainly feel like AI maximalism is the only way it all maths up. There is a bit that Matt Levine writes about AI companies, and you touch on basically the same points, that roughly goes "you are an AI company and you are making the god-computer. Why would you focus on anything else because if you're successful you could basically generate infinite money? Turns out to make the god-computer you need a lot of money upfront."[1]

So perhaps they would only respect money and property up to the point that it's necessary.

The more realist answer is that they will keep respecting money and property as capital works to reinforce the status quo and enrich shareholders. You think just because you can do your job faster--or completely--with a machine that you have to work less? Hardly! Now this is where interesting policy questions spring up but I digress.

https://archive.is/20251015175242/https://www.bloomberg.com/...

There are many at Anthropic and other labs who do in fact think this way. In a true AI maximalist world the stock market would be crashing due to the value of future cash flows being obliterated. So in a sense AI maximalism isn't needed to justify these valuations, it's almost the opposite.

> why would they be bound to pay out dividends or otherwise share the fruits of their economic labour?

because they don't control the physical paper that is money.

I dont understand what you mean by "fiat tokens". I don't imagine most people will accept tokens as a currency because they are as good hold of value and predictable as bitcoin.

In a token economy, certainly what you say is a possibility, but as you can imagine, that economy will be unsustainable so back to "regular" money.

Keep it up because your line of thinking is on the right track. Finally some people are starting to ask the right questions on HN.

If Anthropic has an "omnipotent genie" why would they sell it to other people?

If you weren’t investing you were going to be poor even without AI.

Your question gets to the heart of who or what a company "is." If you don't pay dividends to your shareholders, what are you doing with all of your profits? I suppose they could just tell their investors to pound sand and pour it all back into the company, but part of the AI maximalist theory is that costs will approach 0, so it's not clear what they'd even need the money for. I guess Dario could raise his own salary to infinity trillion dollars, but he is accountable to a board of directors (and a trust in this case), so that seems like it's out.

Really the only scenario where Anthropic could screw over its investors in the way you're describing is if it could also take over the legal system and modify its own contractual obligations. Which, I mean, I guess anything is possible if we are in AI maximalist-land. But "AI is the law now" would be a much bigger story than "investors frustrated with low dividends."

I don't understand all you wrote, but I guess you are saying AI leads to communism, so what happens to the investors money in a communist economy?

I mean there are a lot of paradoxes around AI. The chief two among which are:

1. the goal of ai is to end capitalism by disrupting scarcity in economics

2. if ai can build a closed system that prints ai factories, the 99% of humanity essentially are just genetic diversity live stock.

You're describing the thesis of the 1930s Techocracy movement [0], of which AI maximallism and EA are direct ideological successors. The original Technocrats (Musks grandpa for example [1]) argued that the "Price System", i.e. things like money and private ownership was an inefficient bottleneck that aught to be discarded in favour of scientific planning and energy accounting managed by technical experts.

EA-aligned AI labs share this exact ethos. In their view, fiat money and equity markets are merely temporary scaffolding used to raise capital until AGI is achieved. Once a central superintelligence controls manufacturing, software, and logistics, resource distribution shifts from market supply-and-demand to algorithmic optimization.

[0] https://digital.library.cornell.edu/catalog/ss:34227574

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_N._Haldeman?hl=en-GB

I would say they their, and OoenAI, mission is to bring humanity to the next level by sharing everything they have! /s