AI Threatens Capitalism Within 5 Years as US-China Models Battle for Dominance

3 articles · Updated · The Guardian · Sep 13

Less than 5 years into large language model deployment, AI is already replacing knowledge-work tasks and could also automate entrepreneurs, innovators and traders, challenging capitalism’s basic link between labor, profit and ownership.
US and Chinese strategies are driving that debate in different directions: Washington’s firms hoard computing power through cloud access, while Beijing backs open-source models such as Kimi, Qwen and Deepseek to spread adoption and build influence in downstream technologies.
That rivalry, the report argues, is not a path to equality but a contest between two hierarchical forms of info-capitalism, with the winner likely to shape global information technology for the rest of the century.
A proposed third path would use AI to break the link between work and wages through universal basic services or incomes, expand co-operative and non-profit models, and build an 'un-ownable' system designed around human need rather than market power.
The broader claim is that AI may not automatically create a classless society, but it could trigger a general crisis in the existing economic model and open space to redesign how technology serves society.