Norway Should Buy OpenAI

Norway Should Buy OpenAI The Long Arc of History Bends Towards Social Democracy Zachary Jones Feb 05, 2026 AI capabilities are advancing at a faster rate than our institutional response. Soon, a transformative technology will crash into the capitalist political economy, presenting risks to humanity’s survival, autonomy, and democratic order. Especially concerning is the possibility that vast amounts of power and wealth are concentrated into the class that owns the AI systems, or uses those systems to override democratic control. Silicon Valley talks flippantly of a ‘Permanent Underclass’ - and they intend for you to belong to it. Upon the automation of most, and then plausibly all, jobs, we will face an unprecedented crisis of technological unemployment, with gains from a technology trained on the corpus of humanity’s data concentrated into the hands of a small class of shareholders. Large language models are not conjured from nothing. They are trained on vast quantities of text, images, and code scraped from the internet and digitized archives. The models are, in a meaningful sense, derivative works of collective human effort. They are also built on publicly-funded infrastructure: the internet itself, the universities that educated AI researchers, the government grants that supported foundational research, the public datasets that enabled early breakthroughs. DARPA funding seeded neural network research. Public universities trained the PhDs. The data came from all of us. Thi…