Analysis of: Sam Altman’s make-or-break year: can the OpenAI CEO cash in his bet on the future?
The Guardian | January 25, 2026
TL;DR
OpenAI's $1 trillion bet demands massive public resources while promising utopia—classic primitive accumulation dressed in futurist clothing. As Altman courts Trump and abandons safety concerns, workers face job destruction while capitalists extract value from an unproven technology bubble.
Sam Altman's OpenAI represents a crystallization of late-stage capitalist accumulation dynamics, where massive resource extraction—energy consumption exceeding entire European nations, $1.4 trillion in datacenter investment—is justified through utopian promises of solving climate change and creating 'universal extreme wealth.' The company embodies the contradiction at the heart of contemporary tech capitalism: while burning through tens of billions in losses, it demands public infrastructure, regulatory protection, and state contracts while simultaneously lobbying to prevent any meaningful oversight. The article reveals how capital-state relations have evolved under financialized monopoly capitalism. Altman's pivot from comparing Trump to Hitler to praising him as 'incredible for the country' demonstrates how class interests override ideological posturing when regulation threatens accumulation. OpenAI's $2.99 million lobbying budget, bipartisan consultant hiring, and cultivation of executive branch ties represent the political work required to maintain favorable conditions for capital extraction. The $200 million military contract illustrates the military-industrial-digital complex emerging as AI becomes integrated into state violence. Most revealing is Altman's own ideological framework, expressed since 2013: technological progress is inevitable, inequality will increase, and we 'should be careful not to legislate against it.' This nakedly articulates the capitalist class position—that workers must bear the costs of 'disruption' (job destruction) while promised benefits remain perpetually on the horizon. The circular funding deals, too-big-to-fail concerns, and bubble warnings signal that the AI investment frenzy may represent fictitious capital accumulation, where value claims far exceed actual productive capacity.
Class Dynamics
Actors: Tech capitalist class (Altman, venture capitalists, OpenAI investors), Financial capitalists (investment firms, IPO speculators), State apparatus (Trump administration, military, regulators), Professional-managerial class (lobbyists, consultants, engineers), Working class (workers facing automation, gig workers, data laborers), Petty bourgeoisie (content creators facing copyright issues)
Beneficiaries: OpenAI investors and executives positioned for trillion-dollar IPO, Chipmakers and datacenter developers receiving infrastructure contracts, Military-industrial complex gaining AI warfare capabilities, Venture capitalists like Andreessen Horowitz shaping regulatory narrative, Energy companies (including nuclear startups) benefiting from datacenter demand
Harmed Parties: Workers in 'whole classes of jobs going away', Communities bearing environmental costs of energy-intensive datacenters, Content creators and artists facing copyright infringement, Users exposed to deepfakes, misinformation, and mental health harms, Taxpayers potentially backstopping 'too big to fail' companies, Global South populations targeted by biometric extraction (Worldcoin orb)
The article depicts an increasingly seamless fusion between concentrated tech capital and state power. Altman's access to Trump, Mar-a-Lago dinners, and state dinners with foreign heads of state demonstrates how capital accumulation at this scale requires direct political mediation. The Trump administration's preemption of state-level AI regulation represents the state acting as executive committee of the tech bourgeoisie, overriding democratic governance to facilitate accumulation. Meanwhile, the shift from safety rhetoric to 'AI future is not going to be won by hand-wringing' signals that capital's short-term profit imperatives have overcome even performative concern for social harms.
Material Conditions
Economic Factors: Massive capital concentration—$1 trillion potential valuation despite ongoing losses, Fictitious capital dynamics—circular funding deals inflating valuations beyond productive value, Energy resource competition—datacenter demand exceeding European nations' consumption, Financialization—IPO preparation prioritizes stock price over productive sustainability, Labor arbitrage—AI as tool for replacing human workers and depressing wages, Military-industrial integration—$200 million defense contract as revenue source
OpenAI exemplifies the extractive logic of digital platform capitalism. Value is extracted through multiple channels: the unpaid digital labor of users whose interactions train AI models, the appropriation of creative workers' copyrighted content, and the planned elimination of workers across industries. The company's products function as means of production that compete with and displace human labor while concentrating control over productive capacity in fewer hands. The $12 billion quarterly losses indicate that current operations extract more value than they produce—a classic speculative bubble where anticipated future monopoly rents justify present accumulation. Altman's personal investments in nuclear energy, brain-computer interfaces, and biometric surveillance represent vertical integration across the infrastructure required for AI's material reproduction.
Resources at Stake: Energy resources sufficient to power European nations, Computational infrastructure worth $1.4 trillion, Human biometric data (17.5 million eyeball scans and counting), Labor power across 'nearly half the tasks in the economy', Public infrastructure and potential government backstops, Intellectual property and training data from content creators, Military applications and state security apparatus
Historical Context
Precedents: Railroad speculation bubbles of the 1870s—massive infrastructure investment justified by future monopoly rents, Dot-com bubble—tech valuations detached from productive value, Enclosure movements—privatization of commons (now digital/data commons), Standard Oil-era monopoly capitalism and subsequent regulatory capture, Military-industrial complex formation during Cold War, Neoliberal privatization of public utilities and infrastructure
OpenAI's trajectory represents the culmination of several neoliberal-era trends. The company embodies financialized monopoly capitalism, where valuations derive not from current production but from anticipated future market dominance. The lobbying apparatus and regulatory capture efforts mirror the deregulation strategies that produced the 2008 financial crisis. Altman's vision of inevitable technological unemployment creating unspecified 'policy opportunities' echoes the TINA ('There Is No Alternative') ideology that has justified austerity and labor market 'flexibility' since the 1980s. The integration of AI into military operations continues the post-WWII pattern of state-funded technological development serving capital accumulation while socializing research costs.
Contradictions
Primary: The fundamental contradiction is between AI capital's need for massive public resources (energy, infrastructure, regulatory protection, military contracts) and its privatization of all resulting value. OpenAI demands socialized costs while promising privatized 'universal extreme wealth'—a logical impossibility that reveals the utopian framing as ideological cover for class extraction.
Secondary: Altman's pivot from safety rhetoric to dismissing regulation exposes the contradiction between AI's marketed beneficence and capital's imperative to avoid constraints on accumulation, The 'too big to fail' dynamics contradict Altman's claim that failure would be 'on us'—concentrated capital cannot absorb its own losses, The promise of abundance contradicts the admission that 'whole classes of jobs' will disappear without concrete redistribution mechanisms, OpenAI's claimed mission to benefit humanity contradicts its military contracts for 'warfighting' applications, The bubble warnings from analysts contradict the continued investment, suggesting irrational exuberance driven by speculative dynamics
These contradictions may resolve in several directions. A speculative collapse could socialize losses through government bailouts while preserving private ownership—the 2008 pattern. Alternatively, continued expansion could produce a genuine 'too big to fail' entity requiring permanent state subsidy, creating a form of state-monopoly capitalism. Worker resistance to automation-driven unemployment could generate political pressure for redistribution, though Altman's regulatory capture efforts aim to preempt this. The environmental contradiction—AI's energy demands versus climate crisis—may force material reckoning as resource constraints intensify. Most likely, absent organized working-class opposition, the contradictions will be displaced rather than resolved, with costs externalized onto workers, communities, and the environment.
Global Interconnections
OpenAI's expansion must be understood within global imperialist dynamics. The company's trillion-dollar datacenter plans and energy demands will intensify resource extraction in the Global South while concentrating technological power in core capitalist nations. The biometric 'orb' project exemplifies data colonialism—extracting value from peripheral populations' bodies. The framing of AI development as a 'technology race with China' invokes nationalist ideology to justify deregulation and military integration, obscuring how both nations' AI development serves their respective capitalist classes rather than workers. The article's casual mention that datacenters will consume more power than European nations reveals the metabolic rift between capitalist accumulation and ecological sustainability. As Jason Hickel's work demonstrates, infinite growth on a finite planet is materially impossible. AI's energy demands accelerate the climate crisis while Altman promises AI will 'solve climate change'—a contradiction that can only be sustained through ideological mystification. The nuclear investments represent not solutions but displacement of the environmental contradiction onto future generations and peripheral communities.
Conclusion
Altman's 'make-or-break year' is actually a referendum on whether concentrated capital can successfully extract another round of value from workers, the environment, and the state before the speculative bubble bursts. The alignment of tech capital with reactionary state power—exemplified by Altman's Trump embrace and JD Vance's dismissal of safety concerns—signals that the ruling class has chosen accumulation over legitimacy. For workers, the implications are clear: the promised benefits of AI remain perpetually deferred while the costs—job destruction, surveillance, environmental degradation, military violence—are already materializing. The contradictions within AI capitalism create openings for organized resistance, but only if workers recognize that Altman's utopian promises serve to demobilize opposition to present extraction. The task is to demand not better AI but democratic control over technological development and the social surplus it generates.
Suggested Reading
- The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff (2019) Zuboff's analysis of behavioral data extraction as a new accumulation logic directly illuminates OpenAI's business model, from training data appropriation to the biometric 'orb' project.
- The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein (2007) Klein's framework of disaster capitalism explains how AI's promised disruptions—job destruction, social dislocation—create opportunities for capital to impose favorable conditions while populations are disoriented.
- Capital, Volume 1 by Karl Marx (1867) Marx's analysis of primitive accumulation and the tendency toward monopoly provides theoretical grounding for understanding how OpenAI's expansion privatizes commons while concentrating productive capacity.
- Late Capitalism by Ernest Mandel (1972) Mandel's analysis of technological innovation cycles and speculative capital accumulation in late capitalism illuminates the bubble dynamics and fictitious capital formations surrounding AI investment.