Don’t Just Nationalize AI. Democratize It.

Public ownership of AI is no guarantee of democracy. We need democratic public ownership to prevent elites from maintaining control of the technology.

By Michael A. McCarthy, Jacobin

With Bernie Sanders’ recent announcement of a plan in the works to convert 50 percent of the largest artificial intelligence firms into public ownership, Jacobin has run several pieces on the question of what should be done about the predatory rise and ecologically uncertain future of this new technology. From different analytical angles, Ben Burgis and Dustin Guastella praise the Sanders proposal and both call for the nationalization of AI firms. By contrast, Cecilia Rikap has made the point that ownership does not equal control, and that an American nationalization scheme falls into a “nationalist trap” that would do a further injustice to the rest of the world, whose data also powers these models. She instead calls for “international, democratic control” and new “public institutions.”

I agree with Rikap that what limits many of the perspectives on the Left about nationalization more generally is that “democratization” is so often treated solely as a question of public ownership. The question of who holds the stock of these firms and accumulates wealth from their operations, whether nationally or globally, is crucial. But in this debate so far, the equally difficult question of who actually gets to decide how the technology is used and developed, and by what means those decisions are made, has largely been ignored. Instead, it is assumed that state control and public ownership will generate a system of artificial intelligence that reflects the popular sentiment and will. But this assumption borders on pure fantasy. The Left cannot assume that state control will result in an empowered working class and a deepened democracy. After all, even Donald Trump has made the case for the United States taking a major equity stake in these companies.

Democratic AI is only possible if the people whose lives are being reshaped by it have meaningful decision-making power over how it is developed and put to use. But who should be the ones to decide how artificial intelligence is developed? Most agree that we shouldn’t leave something so monumental to Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, or xAI’s Elon Musk. Neither should we begin with what the engineers writing the code want. Nor should we merely do what will generate the greatest financial return to the artificial intelligence firms’ shareholders. And as much as state control of artificial intelligence might sound appealing, for reasons I outline below, we shouldn’t leave it up to elected officials to govern it. All else being equal, nationalization alone would be insufficient and would only deepen and reproduce the worst harms of AI under the current administration. For the question of democracy, we need to begin with a simple question: Who is being affected by the development of AI? And how deeply?