AI Inequality

**Nathaniel Whittemore** (0:00)
Today on the AI Daily Brief, AI Inequality.
The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.
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Now today, we are talking about AI inequality, but in a slightly different way. In this case, I'm talking about the possibility of haves and have nots as dictated by their access to AI models. So this is not a some people will have jobs, some people won't have jobs argument, but an exploration of how we could quickly be going into a world where the quality of the AI that people have access to is far more unequal than it is today.
The background context for this and what got me thinking about it is two parts. The first is the business model constraints that have been a theme running throughout the show for the last couple of weeks. One of our major points of discussion has been what happens to the business models of AI companies when the demand for tokens greatly starts to exceed the supply of tokens. Now why, of course, we are facing this issue now is the broader shift from assisted to agentic AI where a single individual can be consuming billions of tokens, thanks to all the agents they have running around building things and doing things on their behalf. This really came home to roost this week, specifically with Claude Code's big change to how it bills, effectively ending the subsidy for people who aren't building within Anthropic's owned harnesses.
The second bit of context for this exploration has been the way that the introduction of mythos has impacted the way that the US government thinks about models. These two things are combining in ways that I think are quite potent when it comes to the landscape of AI access with some not tremendously great outcomes potentially on the horizon. Now, this is of course a long read slash big think episode. And so to set up the conversation, we're going to read a piece by Antoine Licht, who has been writing some great stuff about the political economy of AI recently, in a piece that he called Cut Off. Summing it up quite simply in the subheader, soon Antoine writes, access to frontier AI will be scarce and selective.
So first we'll read Antoine's piece, and then we'll build from there.
He writes, there's a common mantra in the outskirts of AI policy thought. Driven by market pressures and overheated capital markets, AI tokens will soon be abundant, and the future belongs to those who can use them best. The further you get away from San Francisco, the louder this mantra grows. It reaches a fever pitch in the peripheries. The many middle powers of the world still caught up in a plan to navigate the AI revolution on the basis of merely good enough models. That view requires important AI capabilities to be widely accessible. Defenders have access to models before attackers do. Firms in all domains compete based on access to the same AI capabilities.
Recent events have thrown that view for a loop, and it now seems clear that access to frontier AI will soon be limited by economic and security constraints. In early April, Anthropic announced it had developed Mythos, a leading cybersecurity model, and that it would only make its considerable ability to patch extant vulnerabilities available to a select few companies. Cybersecurity startups in the Mission District, systems integrators on the Eastern Seaboard, and allied capitals on the Atlantic and Pacific all had a similar experience, scrolling down the page to see the list of privileged partners only to find a limited selection of U.S.-based corporations. Perhaps, you were hopeful that OpenAI was going to stick to its preferred method of rollout, that it would release GPT-55 Cyber, a model reportedly similar to Mythos and Capabilities, more broadly. And yet, it did not. In their Daybreak Initiative, OpenAI, too, committed to a limited release, dispelling hopes that this was a fluke or doom or marketing. Even worse, while it's not quite clear to anyone, including the US government, what exactly the US government will do about all this, by all reports, it's at least planning to do something at some point. And while it's easy to dismiss this as a confluence of current events, the mythos moment actually reveals structural trends that have been ramping up for a while.