Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, offered a deceptively simple line in a recent interview, saying that “growth and economic value will come very easily” with powerful artificial intelligence (AI), but “distribution of benefits, distribution of wealth, political freedom” will not. That sentence captures the core risks of the AI era. There are very convincing arguments that claim the root of societal collapse is the inequality of wealth and power among its citizens. AI supercharges that inequality to a level that we have never known. It’s not whether AI will be transformative. It will. The problem is whether the incentives governing AI will pull society toward cohesion or fracture. Three forces are converging: AI monetization via advertising, AI-driven disruption of current economic and sociopolitical infrastructure, and the rise of agentic systems that act autonomously in domains where human governance moves too slowly. Frontier AI is expensive. We’ve all seen investment numbers that defy understanding. Training, serving and scaling models requires capital and compute at a