As someone who came to artificial intelligence via economics and finance, when I first began advising and writing about technology public policies, I was struck by a paradox. At every roundtable, someone would raise the specter of overregulation stifling innovation. Yet, when I asked who was lobbying for these lighter-touch rules, the answer was always the same: the largest firms, already miles ahead. The AI revolution, like the digital revolutions before it, is not a level playing field. It is a race where the starting gun has already fired — and only a few had a head start.
The central question is no longer whether artificial intelligence will reshape our economy, but who will benefit from that transformation. The political economy of AI — how power, capital, and influence interact to shape its development — is the dimension too often ignored. If we fail to address it, we risk entrenching a new regime of algorithmic power, where the rules are set not by democratic deliberation, but by those who already own the infrastructure.
