Anthropic’s IPO: How AI monopolies reshape labor, democracy, and climate under neoliberal tech governance
Original framing: “Cinco claves para entender los próximos pasos de la salida a bolsa de Anthropic” — Bloomberg
Marginalized voices—like *Kenyan *hustlers*** protesting AI-driven gig work or *Indian *jugaad*** engineers hacking open-source alternatives—are erased from IPO narratives. The *AI Ethics Board* in Ghana found that 90% of African workers in AI training are paid less than $2/day, yet this is framed as ‘voluntary’ labor. Even *Silicon Valley’s own* janitorial and cafeteria workers (who clean the data centers) are excluded from the ‘AI revolution’ narrative, revealing a *new feudalism* where cognitive labor is extracted without consent.
Anthropic’s IPO is not an isolated ‘tech event’ but a *structural power grab* embedded in a century-old playbook of monopoly formation, regulatory capture, and labor exploitation—now repackaged as ‘AI innovation.
’ The omission of Indigenous data sovereignty frameworks, historical parallels to oil/pharma monopolies, and marginalized labor voices reveals a *deliberate erasure* of systemic alternatives. Solutions like public ownership, carbon-accounting mandates, and decolonial governance are not radical fantasies but *proven models* (e.g., *Iceland*, *Taiwan*, *Māori* initiatives) that could redirect AI’s trajectory from extractive monopoly to *public commons*. The trickster lens cuts through the solemnity of ‘disruption’ to expose how Anthropic’s rise is less about ‘cutting-edge science’ and more about *replicating feudal power structures*—this time over cognition itself.