Musk is seizing government data to profiteer from AI

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has fed data from the Department of Education into artificial intelligence (AI) software. At the same time, Musk has led a $94.7bn bid to purchase OpenAI – the previously non-profit company that developed Chat GPT.

The AI revolution is only viable as socialist

Musk already owns xAI, which he founded in March 2023. The billionaire has issued warm words on the future of the technology. Speaking via a conference in Paris in May 2024, Musk said:

If you want to do a job that’s kind of like a hobby, you can do a job. But otherwise, AI and the robots will provide any goods and services that you want.

This idea is progress. One’s purpose can be intellectual, social, creative, and comedic rather than working for the sake of it. Musk said the lack of a job would require a “universal high income” – otherwise known as a citizens dividend.

The thing is, this is the same guy that gave a Nazi salute at Donald Trump’s inauguration. He tried to establish plausible deniability around the salute through coupling it with saying “my heart goes out to you”, but the highly concerning stunt fooled basically no one except corporate media hacks. Celebrating Nazi ideals is the opposite to a socialist vision for the fourth industrial revolution.

Musk and xAi – corporate sanitising

As a ‘public benefit company’, Musk’s xAI is also a contradictory act of corporate sanitising. This type of corporation says it will “create public benefit” at the same time as saying that “the creation of public benefit is in the best interests of the Benefit Corporation”. So when these two ideals inevitably collide, which wins? Well, public benefit companies have no cap on return profits.

Indeed, xAI released Grok-2 in August 2024 – an AI service that can generate image as well as text responses. But that service is limited only to paid up X (formerly Twitter) subscribers. Another example of the issue with the lofty claims of public benefit company xAI is that these corporations are supposed to value environmental concerns.

Yet xAI developed a super computer to process data for AI that environmental campaigners say is guzzling vast amounts of gas without even a permit to do so. What’s the point of AI delivering progress for humanity, if the planet becomes unhabitable?

On 11 February, the US (and the UK) refused to sign up to even a basic declaration regarding AI. The acknowledgement states that it seeks to ensure that “AI is open, inclusive, transparent, ethical, safe, secure and trustworthy, taking into account international frameworks for all”, while “making AI sustainable for people and the planet”.

Vice president JD Vance showed his backwards thinking on AI when speaking about his opposition to the declaration. He said that “Should a deal seem too good to be true, just remember the old adage that we learned in Silicon Valley, if you aren’t paying for the product: you are the product.”

The thing is, AI becomes a self-sustaining product that doesn’t require significant or eventually basically any labour – therefore it doesn’t require payment.

Musk: this won’t end well

Calum Chace, author of Surviving AI, previously warned that without a socialist vision for the technology:

There will be people who own the AI, and therefore own everything else…Which means homo sapiens will be split into a handful of ‘gods’, and then the rest of us.

With Musk and his ilk at the helm, this is exactly what may happen.

Featured image via the Canary