AI Frontier Research: How Elite Economists Shape Corporate Power Over Knowledge Systems
Original framing: “<strong>Anthropic's Co-Founder and Top Economist on Doing Research at the AI Frontier</strong>” — Bloomberg
The narrative centers two elite white men in a field dominated by similar demographics, erasing the contributions of Black, Indigenous, and Global South researchers who have long warned about AI’s harms. Labor organizers, like those in the *Tech Workers Coalition*, are excluded despite their firsthand experience with AI-driven workplace surveillance and automation. The framing also ignores the voices of affected communities, such as those in the Global South who bear the brunt of extractive AI practices, from lithium mining for batteries to algorithmic bias in healthcare.
The Bloomberg interview exemplifies how elite technocrats—Jack Clark and Peter McCrory—frame AI as a frontier of neutral innovation, obscuring the colonial, capitalist, and neoliberal structures that shape its development.
Their narrative serves corporate power by naturalizing extractive research agendas, while marginalizing Indigenous epistemologies (e.g., *mātauranga*), Global South perspectives, and labor voices who have long warned about AI’s harms. Historically, this mirrors the IMF’s role in designing systems that prioritize growth over equity, now repackaged as 'AI alignment.' A systemic solution requires dismantling these power structures through participatory governance, open-source commons, degrowth principles, and binding international tribunals—approaches already piloted in pockets of the Global South and progressive cities. The 'frontier' metaphor, when examined through a trickster lens (Hermes, Anansi), reveals its absurdity: a handful of technocrats deciding the fate of a technology that could either deepen inequality or become a tool for ecological and social repair. The path forward demands not just technical fixes but a reimagining of knowledge itself as a shared, sacred, and bounded resource.