AI and the Coming White-Collar Political Upheaval (www.wsj.com)

AI has moved from tech-page curiosity to front-page political economy story as massive private investment accelerates a rapid transformation. Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon together spent about $360 billion last year largely on AI development and data centers, while Nvidia — whose GPUs are the compute backbone of modern models — hit a $5 trillion market valuation. Corporate shifts are amplifying this wave: OpenAI’s recent for-profit transition into a public-benefit structure lets it raise bigger pools of capital and talent, and Anthropic, backed by Amazon and Google, is targeting enterprise customers rather than consumer search. In short, compute, data-center capacity, specialized chips and new corporate forms are aligning to scale AI faster than prior tech cycles. The significance for AI/ML is twofold: technical and political. Technically, the concentration of compute, cloud infrastructure and model expertise creates winner-take-most dynamics—who controls chips, data and large-scale training will shape available capabilities. Politically, the speed and scale of disruption threaten to reorder white-collar labor markets, corporate power and regulation; firms with deep pockets can lobby, consolidate markets, and pivot business models toward enterprise AI, altering incentives for safety, access and competition. For researchers and policymakers, that means urgent focus on governance, equitable labor transitions, compute capacity distribution, and guardrails as models become economically and politically consequential.