Paul Mason: AI Could Trigger a Crisis of Capitalism, Opening a Third Way Beyond US and Chinese Models

Key facts

• Paul Mason is a broadcaster and author of Reds: A Global History of Communism (Apollo).
• In July, Dean Ball, head of strategic futures at OpenAI, claimed China's open-source AI advocacy might bring about 'full AI communism' and called state-provided digital public infrastructure a 'dystopian hellscape.'
• Karl Marx in 1858 imagined socialised knowledge merging into a 'general intellect' that would blow capitalism's foundations sky high.
• Aristotle's Politics cites a fantasy from the Iliad about machines acting independently of human direction.
• Chinese AI models mentioned include Kimi, Qwen and Deepseek.
• The US AI strategy hoards computing power and gives access only via the internet; China's counterplay is open-source AI run locally with data firewalled.
• Beijing gambles on winning supremacy in technologies built on AI, such as brain-machine interfaces, bioengineering and the 'low altitude economy' of delivery drones.
• Economist Philippe Aghion said AI might automate entrepreneurial skill and destroy the link between innovation and profit.
• Mason proposes universal basic services and incomes, co-operative and non-profit business models, and using AI to replace the market as a rational allocation mechanism.
• Mason suggests trailing six months behind Claude or Kimi to design an un-ownable AI model with humanism and universal values built in.
• Books referenced: Atlas of AI by Kate Crawford (Yale, £12.99), Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani (Verso, £9.99), AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee (Harper Business, £12.99).