AI as Double Speak for Austerity

As world leaders convene for the Paris AI Action Summit next week, they must confront a troubling reality: the rapid deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) in the public sector is exacerbating inequality, expanding mass surveillance, and violating human rights. In just the first few weeks of the year, we are already seeing how governments across the world are relentlessly pursuing projects that will advance greater automation of our lives. The UK government announced a huge public rollout of AI technologies, touting how AI will be ‘Mainlined into UK’s veins.’ A week later, the Trump administration revealed a staggering $500bn Stargate AI infrastructure project between OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank, and MGX. These investments are part of a larger trend, one where government-backed experimentation of AI infrastructure in the public sector is accompanied by crushing budget cuts to essential services such as housing, education, and healthcare. While governments present these announcements as ‘efficiency solutions’, they increasingly go hand in hand with austerity policies and the deployment of data-intensive AI technologies that ultimately lead to exclusion, discrimination, and the entrenchment of corporate power. In fact, such mass-scale public sector experimentations in AI are only possible because of corporate power that is deeply entangled in state tech infrastructure. This includes AI companies often lauding their technologies as transformative efficiency tools, which to governments also immersed in the language of efficiency is a deeply compelling sell. However, recent events have shown yet again how shaky the promises of these companies are. For instance, DeepSeek’s launch threw the AI sector, pundits, and the stock market into disarray for disproving US companies’ claims on the scale of computational power, costs, and data required to build new generative AI systems. These same companies claimed that such computational power was the necessary means to achieve AI that would take us out of the climate disaster despite incurring massive environmental costs even to get there.