Corporate AI is currently amplifying a gigantic redistribution effort from many to a few. One of the bizarre symptoms was the brief existence of “the world’s first trillionaire”. But the underlying shift is structural and will affect every one of us.
The core message of this post is that we can reverse this. For this, we need to unite. We now have a chance to connect the diverse mix of organizations, small and medium companies, and people who share a common goal: We don’t want to be marginalized in this process.
In fact, we can take this as a chance to take humanity to a new level of freedom, prosperity, and justice. But for this to happen, we need to be serious about our values. We can’t somehow keep playing the old game and hope it will all work out.
This is why CosyAI is based on the concept of “cooperating sincerely”. No more “a little better alignment” here and “a little more regulation” there. We need to fundamentally redesign the ownership structures of AI and completely abandon the misaligned incentives that are currently guiding AI development.
Call it Automation Infrastructure (AI)
The real reason why companies and governments are currently investing resources at unprecedented levels into one technology is to build automation infrastructure. In fact, this might be a more accurate reading of the shortcut A.I.
While we get entertained with fascinating feats and exciting promises about what AI can or will be able to do, the underlying process is a boring, structural redesign of our economies.
If we just fear losing our jobs, we underestimate the impact of this. The drivers of this redesign are set on automating every single process that is commercially valuable. The more this succeeds, the more it will render the vast majority of humans systemically obsolete.
There is much storytelling around how “AI will benefit us all”. Often people use examples like “curing cancer” and “automating boring tasks”. But the actual focus of AI development is elsewhere: coding, robotics, and the automation of complex work processes. This is where the investors that currently push AI forward expect trillions of dollars in returns.
We are being used for a global experiment
The AI we are currently using in the form of chatbots and productivity tools is not the AI that will transform our societies. In this current phase, the big AI Labs are giving us these tools essentially for one purpose: data harvesting.
Every time a developer improves messy code by AI, they provide valuable data for training future systems. It was this process that led to the breakthroughs in agentic coding that we saw since the beginning of 2026. The same happens, if we use chatbots and other tools and improve the outputs through multiple iterations. By our very use, we provide extremely valuable data.
Now, corporations start giving us “free” agentic systems to “help” with our daily tasks and work. This is another large scale effort to involve us in the extraction of our own knowledge and skills.
The real driver behind this is the corporate logic. AI is optimized for maximizing corporate growth rather than reflecting the values and needs of human societies. Never mind the storytelling about “AI alignment” or “benefiting humanity”.
The risk might not be where you expect it
The threat of job automation is real. But the risk might not be so much about unemployment. If companies can automate most of their processes, workers and unions lose their leverage. This is the real risk.
AI is fundamentally different to all technological transformations humanity has gone through in the past. For the first time, a technology can learn by itself, improve itself, and adapt to any challenge. If this results in a new area of valuable work for humans, AI development will focus there until it is automated, too.
Turning the whole world into “the poor”
What the “job replacement hypothesis” is not taking into account is that there will be still use for human labor. We will just be paid less. Instead of mass unemployment, the real effect is the absolute collapse of human bargaining power. And there is basically no limit to how low the pay for human labor can get. We can see this playbook already in the exploitation of people in the poorest countries today.
If you want to get an idea of what being systemically obsolete looks like, take a look at the slums and refugee camps of today. You will not just face poverty, but also a complete lack of chances to change your situation. Labor standards are a luxury for people who have options.
When humans are cheaper than robots
Most of the work that people do in the mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo could theoretically be done by machines and robot technology we already have today. But there are more valuable use cases for today’s advanced machines and robots, like assembling electric vehicles, or computer chips, or building more robots. It is simply cheaper to let the mining work be done by humans who work extreme hours for barely any pay.
Essentially, this is the vision the big tech corporations are currently working towards. Steadily and not so slowly, corporate AI is pushing us all into the conditions of the people who mine the minerals for our electric cars, laptops, smart phones.
We will never run out of work, because there will always be some work for which humans are cheaper than robots.
The “no-consumers-left argument” does not work
People often argue: if no-one earns money anymore there would be no-one left to buy the stuff that is produced. But this demand side argument falsely assumes that the AI economy would look like our economy today.
The transition into a fully automated economy itself creates an enormous demand circle of infrastructure building. Data center construction, robot production, resource harvesting all are economic activities that can be scaled almost infinitely.
And even if wealth concentration reaches an extreme where only a handful of human “consumers” are left, the demand for luxury goods, status symbols, and power instruments is literally limitless. Today’s super-rich need yachts, security guards, and their own islands. In the future, they might need spaceships, robot armies, and their own planets.
Regulation will not fix this
The obvious response to this is to look at our governments. Can’t we just prevent this through regulation, taxes, breaking up the corporations, and making sure that sovereignty is kept with the people?
But this rationale is based on the assumption that the majority matters. A state that no longer needs its population as workers, soldiers, or tax base has no structural reason to redistribute anything to them, or to protect them from exploitation. Again, look at the poorest countries to see how this plays out.
Even if governments were serious about protecting their citizens, regulation currently is simply too slow and ineffective. The challenge of climate change has shown how public institutions can struggle for decades to create and enforce global regulations. Regulating AI in a responsible way presents an even more urgent global challenge. It would require well-designed and effective international responses in real-time, which is very far from the political reality in any country today.
Even where rules do get written, corporations have enormous resources to lobby them in their favor. The methods of corruption and policy capture are particularly effective in the field of AI, thanks to the steep information asymmetries that create an ideal ground for exercising undue influence. On top of that, corporations frequently choose to simply accept paying fines for ignoring regulations that don’t suit their interests, rendering the regulation ineffective.
None of this means giving up on public institutions. At CosyAI we are committed to supporting initiatives that push for the development of balanced and effective regulatory frameworks for AI wherever we can.
We also strongly support initiatives that want to bring AI infrastructure into public ownership and turn it into a commons.
But we cannot wait for regulation to protect us. At this point, we, as citizens of the world, need to step up and take things in our own hand. This is why CosyAI aims at reclaiming ownership of AI and creating the version of AI that we actually want.
You can join now and help make it happen.
The window is still open
There is no question that we are living in a time where the global power structures will be redefined. If we take action now, we still have a chance to play a role in shaping our future. In fact, we have more power than it might seem.
Consider a major corporation like Google. If we follow the traces of power to where action creates reality, we can see that it is not with the CEO, or the board, or even with the shareholders. The real power is with the people who do the everyday work.
If all of them stopped working now, almost no value would remain in the company. CEOs and shareholders hold power because staff follows their instructions, bound by contracts that can individually be enforced through state authorities. But no contract could hold, if everyone acted collectively.
This might sound like an extreme idea, but the scale of threat that we are facing collectively is at least as extreme. And the goal can’t be to simply boycott or dissolve the big tech corporations. The goal is to redesign ownership and the inbuilt incentives of these enormous organizations, so that they are aligned with the well-being of us humans.
This is why owning the infrastructure is crucial
The leverage that remains when human work becomes less relevant lies in the infrastructure and data pipelines that AI runs and learns on.
Developing cutting-edge AI technologies requires massive computing power, necessitating supercomputers composed of tens of thousands of high-end GPUs. Most of this computing power is currently controlled by large corporations like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. Investment into the leading labs often takes the form of cloud computing credits, effectively leaving the ownership and ultimate control of these critical infrastructures with the large corporations.
And the more AI is used to automate work, the more it becomes the core instrument of value creation in the economy. Whoever owns it, owns the future.
Reclaiming control
Of course, it makes little sense to try and compete with the “hyperscalers” in the race of building even more and even larger data centers.
We actually don’t need to build data centers from the ground up. We also don’t need to try to beat frontier models on raw capability or on the price of a general-purpose token.
Instead, a different path is already in the making. With CosyAI, we focus on co-owning the infrastructure of the AI we actually use. We join the growing movement around smaller open weight AI models, open source frameworks, and data sovereignty initiatives. Our contribution is to support these trends by offering a platform for resource pooling and common ownership.
This way, we can achieve three things at the same time:
- We prevent the extraction of value that happens when we pay corporations for using AI that runs on their data centers.
- We prevent the extraction of our data that would otherwise train the systems that would eventually render us obsolete.
- We bring control over the path that AI development will take into the hands of the people.
The strength of cooperation
We use the old, proven system of a cooperative to pool resources of the many to get better conditions for everyone. In the beginning, it will be about affordable access to safely hosted AI tools without having to trust big tech.
This is also relevant for small and medium enterprises, cooperatives, and increasingly even large companies. They too face the threat of being pushed out of the market by AI powered tech corporations. Especially for smaller, non-tech companies, this is a way to avoid buying their own hardware and hiring infrastructure engineers.
Step-by-step, CosyAI aims at eventually offering the whole stack of technology for running, improving, and specializing AI in a cooperative ownership framework.
Enabling collective power
It doesn’t need to be within one single organization. Rather, CosyAI aims at orchestrating a smoothly integrated ecosystem of local and specialized cooperatives that offer different parts of the stack. And we do this in close collaboration with other ecosystem projects.
An enormous chance comes with the fact that smaller, more energy efficient AI systems can be as good as the big corporate ones, if they are specialized on specific tasks and use cases. For this, we can use the value of unique data that big tech does not yet have.
We cannot win the race for the most powerful general model, but we can win the race over who controls the parts of the economy that are relevant to us.
This gives cooperatives a structural advantage over the old model of the big tech corporations and venture capital driven startups: Members contribute data and get specialized models back, while the models trained on that data stay inside the cooperative they own. Big tech cannot copy this, because they cannot offer the ownership and structural integrity that enables the level of trust and reliability members need to pool valuable data. The only way for corporations to copy this advantage would be to become a cooperative.
This dynamic also gives us a powerful way for enacting global transformation. If we manage to break the current data grab and start effectively protecting our data now, we can build a collective, decentralized AI infrastructure that keeps the real power with us, the people.
Community data centers
A visible form of this is community data centers. Small nodes, cooperatively owned, hosted in community spaces, connected to local energy cooperatives.
Even if the current hype bubble pops, the community-owned nodes will still be running and serving real value. They were never built on hype economics and generate value through use rather than through hyping up valuation.
A Cooperative Basic Income
If we want to reverse the inequality created through an AI economy driven by the corporate financial system, we need to actively reverse the redistribution that has already occurred.
For this, CosyAI aims at establishing a “cooperative basic income” system. Part of the surplus generated from providing AI infrastructure and tools will be channeled into a basic income pool that supports the members who help build the project. Beneficiaries can also include open source developers, researchers, artists, and cultural creators, who helped create the data originally used to train the AI foundation models.
The basic mechanism is simple. CosyAI will generate revenue by offering subscriptions to safe AI tools and services, as well as access to compute power for inference and model training. A portion of the surplus will be directed into a basic income fund, which will automatically distribute payments to accredited contributor-members. Over time, both the sources of funding and the group of recipients can be expanded.
In the beginning, while revenues go into building the hardware base, the benefit is distributed in kind. Member communities receive access to agentic AI tools, collective self-hosting, and AI literacy resources. Cash payments come once the infrastructure carries itself.
Implementing a basic income through a cooperative system is also a safeguard against state capture. Through the cooperative, we can protect the majority at the moment when AI driven power centralization would undermine our political influence.
It’s also a real alternative to the (potentially misleading) promises by leaders of AI companies who talk about basic income as a mitigation for the inequality they are creating. Rather than creating new unhealthy dependencies that might be revoked or misused at any time, a cooperative basic income that people give themselves is a real way to free ourselves from economic pressures.
Developing AI that we actually want
The beautiful thing is that the same mechanism that we can use to reverse the material inequality machine also helps for preventing manipulation and detrimental mental health effects of AI. By avoiding the misleading incentives that currently lead to extreme power centralization, we also avoid the pressures that push corporate actors into all kind of exploitative activities.
In order to make sure that our organization can’t be corrupted, we need a solid organizational framework that strictly avoids misleading incentives.
The organization we are building combines three well tested structural ingredients:
- The cooperative principles help make sure that the organization is protected from compulsive-growth disorder. When designed correctly, the legal frame of a cooperative can help avoid power centralization and make sure that no-one in the organization is incentivized to prioritize growth over purpose. Instead of trying to enforce purpose alignment through external oversight or regulation, the unhealthy growth incentives are avoided by design.
- Anti-corruption principles keep the organization transparent and accountable, so that influence cannot be bought from outside or accumulated quietly from within.
- Self-organization and sincerity practices keep decisions with the people doing the work, and keep the human relationships between them intact.
A cooperative that is owned by its users and employees has no reason to build systems that hold their attention against their own interest. It prevents a fallback to advertising revenue, and there are no growth targets to misalign the organization. Every member can make sure that data is not used to train systems designed for manipulation or surveillance, and we can use our collective knowledge and expertise to develop an AI that integrates these mechanisms.
Join us
If we manage to build a global coalition of organizations and people who want to take AI into cooperative ownership, we can create a path forward that preserves our freedom.
The first step of coalition building is already done. Our next step is to register a legal cooperative so that we can coordinate the funding of AI products that are truly driven by the needs of our members.
You can now make a pledge to become a founding member with a share of 100 Euro. This helps us to kick the project off the ground and launch our first products.
You can also support us directly by making a donation to the non-profit that is currently stewarding CosyAI.
And you can join as an active contributor by joining one of our task forces.
By doing any of these, you help us build a true alternative to big tech power centralization.
The window is still open, but the longer we wait, the harder it will get to reclaim control over our future.
Any support is welcome, we need to join forces now.