The Future Is for Everyone Who Wins the Auction

In Richland Parish, Louisiana, some certified teachers received end-of-year cheques of just over fifty thousand dollars this year. The money came through an existing school-board formula that distributes local sales-tax revenue, a pool suddenly swollen by construction of the data centre Meta is building there. Mark Zuckerberg tells the story near the middle of the manifesto he published on Monday, and he tells it more simply: Meta came to town, teachers got a fifty-thousand-dollar bonus, educators began arriving from across the country and the district could become one of the best in the nation. It is a good story. A town gets a windfall. A school system gets its pick of applicants. The future arrives and pays its way.

Richland Parish is the only community named in the document. The document is called The Future is for Everyone.

It runs to about 6,500 words, sits at meta.com under its own vanity URL and follows the short letter on personal superintelligence Zuckerberg released last July. It closes with his first name, like a memo. The creed comes in three parts: individual empowerment as the source of prosperity, invention as the purpose of superintelligence, balance of power as the foundation of safety. Around the creed, the product announcements. A community fund the press reports at a billion dollars. A workforce academy training carpenters and electricians for the data centre build-out. A resumption of open-weight model releases. A governance change giving Meta’s board approval over the safety criteria for releasing models. And one proposal I will come back to, because it is the strangest thing in the document: frontier labs should hand government intermediate checkpoints of their models while training is still under way.

The manifesto is the latest entry in what has become a genre. Dario Amodei’s essays in January and June asked government to bind the labs, and hung the whole regime, as I argued at the time, on a measurement capability nobody possesses. OpenAI has spent two years dissolving oversight into the platform’s terms of service. Now Meta completes the set with a theory in which government accelerates the infrastructure, maintains the export controls, streamlines the FDA, receives frontier checkpoints early and refrains from binding the labs through any standing external release regime. Read the three side by side and one property repeats. Each company’s political philosophy is isomorphic to its business model. Anthropic’s justifies gated access, which is what Anthropic sells. OpenAI’s justifies the platform, which is what OpenAI is. And Meta, whose durable advantage has always been distribution at planetary scale, has produced a theory of safety in which distribution is the safety mechanism.

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Start with the strongest part, because there is one.

The best argument in the document is about alignment. Most alignment talk treats human values as a destination, a place a system can be steered to. Zuckerberg’s objection is that no such place exists. People hold opposing values, those values encode different tradeoffs on questions that matter, and a system serving one person’s values must rank another person’s lower. “There is no such thing as a singular benevolent superintelligence.” On that sentence he is closer to right than many of his critics will find comfortable, and I say so having spent two years asking the same question from the other side: aligned to whom, for what purpose, under whose veto. The phrase human values has always been a noun concealing a fight.

The disagreement is over what follows. From the premise that no single system can serve everyone, the manifesto derives that safety means giving everyone a system of their own and letting the systems check each other, the way markets and elections are supposed to distribute and check power. Superintelligence for each, balanced against superintelligence for all. It is a real political theory, Locke by way of a product roadmap.

The hidden conversion in that argument is from access to power. A person may have an agent without owning the model, controlling the compute, choosing its updates, seeing what formed it or holding any right of appeal when it acts against them. Meta can distribute an interface to billions while keeping sovereignty over the system behind it. Distribution is not a constitution. The theory still deserves a real reading, and a real reading means holding it against the product details published alongside it.

The polemical passages, first, because their targets are barely veiled. The most dangerous scenario, the document says, is a lab training powerful models and keeping them for itself, whatever language of responsibility gets wrapped around the withholding. The clearest available referent is Anthropic’s invitation-only Mythos programme, whose most capable cyber and biology model is available only to a small group of vetted organisations. And the case that alignment has curdled into centralised dogma rests on a single anecdote: a leading model that refused to help write a letter to prospective parents because it disapproved of standardised testing. One unattributed, unreproducible anecdote, carrying an entire indictment. I have spent three years arguing that assessment cultures deserve interrogation, and even I can see what the anecdote is doing. It makes a rival’s judgement look like ideology inside a document whose own judgements are presented as physics.

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Now the first seam, the one that runs through the centre of the theory.

To show why distribution is safety, Zuckerberg builds a set of thought experiments, and the courtroom one carries the most weight. Imagine one person with a superintelligent lawyer: an unfair advantage, he argues, even when they are wrong on the merits. Now imagine everyone with one: justice delivered more fairly than today, when cases turn on imbalances of skill and money. The same shape repeats for cybersecurity and for business. Every version turns on the same hinge. The manifesto never promises equal intelligence. The courtroom thought experiment quietly requires it.

A few pages earlier, the access bullet explains how everyone will actually get it. Free versions for billions of people. And for those who want more, a dynamic auction: compute allocated by bidding, at the lowest price the mechanism can find, so that capacity flows to whatever people collectively find most valuable.

As market design this is familiar. Scarce compute has to be rationed somehow and an auction can clear the market. But auctions and votes count differently. An auction weights preference by willingness and ability to pay, and the weighting is the design working as intended. As political theory it dissolves the courtroom on contact. In the world the document actually specifies, both litigants have a superintelligent lawyer and one of them bought more intelligence at auction. The imbalance of skill and resources the experiment promised to abolish reappears inside the pricing mechanism, denominated in compute. Distribution priced is not distribution equal. And the gradient can compound, because the organisation that pays for more capability becomes better defended and more productive, which funds the next round of capability, while the free tier watches the distance widen. The title says everyone. The mechanism says everyone is a tier.

The second seam runs deeper, because it contradicts the document’s whole posture rather than one of its illustrations.

The manifesto’s risk register includes government tyranny and surveillance. A full section defends the individual against any imbalance of power favouring the state and promises a private mode so sealed that Meta itself could not open it. Elsewhere in the same document, the centrepiece policy proposal: frontier labs should provide government with intermediate training checkpoints of new models before training completes, staff the arrangement with lab engineers and work with law enforcement to identify people misusing their systems. The stated purpose is hardening critical infrastructure without delaying public releases, and the need is real; this year has supplied incidents enough.

But name the proposal plainly. It creates a privileged corridor through which the next generation of frontier systems reaches the national security state before it reaches the public, with lab engineers attached. The labs keep the systems, so the arrangement stops short of a state monopoly and lands somewhere more characteristic of the emerging order: a standing alliance between private frontier capability and the institutions of state coercion. And the contradiction is contained within the document itself. Zuckerberg says this early access would produce no imbalance of power. A few paragraphs later he prices a two-month capability advantage as enormously valuable and warns that even a one-month delay may decide who leads. Temporal advantage counts as power everywhere in the document except where Meta proposes granting it to the state.

The section on keeping control of self-improving systems performs the same move with higher stakes. It concedes that any lab refusing to point compute at recursive self-improvement will fall behind, which is a precise description of a race no participant can unilaterally exit. Its remedy is that labs should watch what their self-improving systems are optimising for and, if harmful behaviour appears, coordinate and adjust; no external stopping rule is named, and no actor who could compel a stop. It describes a prisoner’s dilemma with complete accuracy and answers it with voluntary coordination among participants the document has just told us cannot afford to fall a month behind. It appoints the prisoners as their own wardens.

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Then the labour theory meets its nearest available test.

The jobs section argues there is no rule that automation must outpace the growth of human capability, that recent statistics, uncited, suggest capability may win and that new occupations will bloom: one-person product studios, world builders, personal biologists. Maybe. The claim at least treats the outcome as contingent rather than inevitable, which is more honesty than the industry usually offers. And the manifesto never asks the question that comes before any job count: who gets the first claim on the time AI saves? On that question there happens to be a nearby answer.

Business Insider reported that at an internal Q&A last month, an employee asked Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s chief technology officer, whether the time AI was saving might come back to staff as time off. Bosworth said his own extra hour goes straight back into the product and then advised the employee: “Ask your parents what they think of that as a career strategy.” He later apologised for coming down too hard, allowing that the question may have been tongue in cheek. The allocation stood. The extra hour belonged to the product. This inside a company that has reportedly shed around eight thousand jobs this year while making AI-driven impact a core performance expectation for the staff who remain.

One town hall cannot settle the labour economics of an entire economy, and the jobs section may yet be vindicated by occupations nobody has imagined. It can settle who holds first claim on the dividend inside the company writing the theory. The manifesto promises agents that free your time for the things you enjoy. Asked who owns the freed time, the manifesto’s employer answered: the employer. When the theory and the payroll disagree, believe the payroll.

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The word doing the selling throughout is everyone, and at this company the word has a history.

In 2013 Facebook launched internet.org, later Free Basics: free access to a curated slice of the internet for people who could not afford data, presented in the same universal grammar this manifesto uses, connectivity as a right, the future extended to all. The effective check on the programme came from organised politics rather than from anywhere inside the product: an Indian civil-society campaign that reportedly put more than a million submissions in front of the telecom regulator, and then the regulator itself, which in February 2016 banned the differential pricing that made Free Basics work, siding with campaigners who argued that a gatekept free internet for the poor was a second-class internet with a corporate curator. Two years after that, United Nations investigators examining the violence against the Rohingya concluded that the platform had played a determining role in spreading the hatred that preceded it, in a country where, as the investigators observed, social media effectively meant Facebook.

A personal agent in 2027 is not a news feed in 2017, and the analogy should not be stretched into an equation. The narrower point survives the caveat. The manifesto’s safety theory rests on the claim that widely distributed capability lets people check power. In the largest universal-access experiment this company has attempted, the checking arrived from institutions and organised publics, precisely the actors the manifesto treats as obstacles, while distribution supplied the reach and none of the answerability. The document engages with none of this record. It does not need to grovel before its history to be serious about the future, but a theory of checks and balances issued by this particular company owes the reader a paragraph on why the mechanism will run differently this time. There is no such paragraph. There is Richland Parish.

The policy chapter settles who everyone addresses. Export controls, the FDA, American energy build-out, American leadership in open-weight models, the community compacts needed to construct across the country: the country is one country. The rest of the species appears as scale, billions of people to whom systems said to encode democratic values will be delivered, and delivered is the load-bearing verb. The open-weight advocacy arrives with a policy ask attached, loosen the restrictions on training data so American open models can win, defended on the principle that anything observable may be learned from. That principle has an obvious convenience for a company whose models are built from everything observable, and I notice the convenience from a particular chair, having spent this year on a national copyright reference group listening to the people whose work was the observed material.

So the everyone of the title divides on inspection. Americans get the compacts, the bonuses and the policy asks. Everyone else gets the distribution.

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One sentence in the document is worth more than the creed, and Zuckerberg offers it as reassurance. Which future arrives, he writes in effect, depends on the balance between the labs building automation and the labs building individual capability, on which of them leads. Strip the reassurance off and read what remains. The labour outcome of this technology is described, by the man running one of the half-dozen companies concerned, as a live choice those companies are currently making. Nobody elected the choosers. And the document presenting that arrangement as comfort is the same document asking government not to slow any of the choosers down by a month. The admission deserves a longer life than the manifesto around it. It should be read back at every hearing.

Which brings me to the part I owe the reader about my own position.

This is the third frontier lab creed I have taken apart in public this year, each within days of its release. The Amodei essay in June brought this newsletter more new readers than anything else I published that month. The economics are visible from where I sit. The manifesto drops, the coverage swarms, the rebuttals follow inside forty-eight hours, and every rebuttal, including a careful one, including this one, certifies the document as the thing serious people must answer. The labs write the theology, the commentary writes the exegesis, and both sides of the page are paid in the same attention. Declining to write cedes the field to lazier readings. Writing completes the release cycle. Both of those are true. I chose the second, and the choice does not come clean.

There is one more absence in the document, visible from my desk if not from most. The document distributes capability everywhere and answerability nowhere. A superintelligent lawyer for every litigant and an appeals process for none of them. The auction has no ombudsman. The document never says whether the community compact is contractual, enforceable or even renewable. The board that now approves Meta’s release criteria may be independent in composition, but it remains inside a founder-controlled company, a fact the manifesto acknowledges without resolving. Across the entire architecture of checks and balances there is no office with standing to demand an explanation, order a remedy or hear an appeal, and so no person who can be made to answer.

The superintendent in Richland Parish believes his district could become one of the best in the region, a hope the manifesto rounds up to the nation, and he may be right, and I hope he is. The teachers’ money is real money in real hands, and it arrived through a pre-existing public formula that gives school employees a claim on local sales-tax receipts, a pool the construction boom suddenly enlarged. Public rules decided who received a share and how much. No clause of Meta’s new community compact was involved.

That distinction carries the political philosophy the manifesto is missing. A gift depends on the giver. A tax creates a public claim. A right, an obligation and a process of appeal can survive the giver’s change of mind. Richland Parish benefited because an institution already existed that could capture part of the future’s value and make it answerable to the people living there.

Meta offers no equivalent institution for intelligence itself. It offers capability for all on terms the distributor sets: a free tier, an auction, a board inside a founder-controlled company and voluntary coordination among competitors. It names no durable right to capability, no institution of appeal and no one outside the system who can compel an answer. Everyone gets the future. The auction decides how much of it.

Drafting disclosure: This essay was developed by Carlo Iacono with OpenAI and Anthropic tools. Carlo directed the argument and remains responsible for its claims and normative judgements, which remain open to contest and revision. Read Most Evenings for further insight.