AI is concentrating power. The window to counter this is now.
All of this is already happening. The data below is from 2024 and 2025.
What is happening right now
Four sourced facts on who controls AI and who it serves.
AI compute is owned by five companies
Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle control 71% of the world's cumulative AI compute, up from 63% eighteen months earlier. Their combined capital expenditure for 2026 exceeds $660 billion. Any community, NGO, or government that needs AI pays rent to this oligopoly.
Epoch AI, 2025
The US gets 23 times more AI investment than China
US private AI investment reached $285.9 billion in 2025. China received $13.3 billion. The Global South received a rounding error. The AI frontier is not a global phenomenon — it is concentrated in a handful of zip codes. Everywhere else is structurally excluded.
Stanford HAI 2026 AI Index
93% of the world's languages are invisible to AI
Only 7% of the world's 7,000 languages appear in published online material. English dominates AI training data at 30%. AI systems built on this data will fail anyone who does not speak English. Not as a bug. As an architectural consequence.
Nature, 2025
The most powerful AI systems are getting less transparent
Stanford HAI's Foundation Model Transparency Index dropped from 58 to 40 in a single year. The most capable AI systems are becoming less auditable as they become more powerful. Power is concentrating. The public's ability to scrutinize it is shrinking.
Stanford HAI 2026 AI Index
What comes next
These follow directly from the trends above.
Young people will live with AI the longest — but are absent from the decisions
The people who will live longest with the consequences of today's AI choices are almost entirely excluded from making them. AI governance, model development, and infrastructure investment are led overwhelmingly by people over 40 in a handful of wealthy countries. The communities that will inherit AI's consequences are not at the table.
AI is used on communities, not by them
The AI Now Institute's 2025 report is direct: today's AI is not just being used by us. It is being used on us. Facial recognition systems misidentify Black and Asian faces 10 to 100 times more often than white faces. Automated hiring filters out applicants whose resumes do not match patterns from existing employees. The communities with the least power have the least recourse.
AI Now Institute 2025; MIT Sloan
The people most affected by AI are the least informed about it
The organizations and communities most subject to AI decisions — in hiring, credit, content moderation, and public services — have the least access to plain-language explanation of how those systems work. The gap between AI capability and public understanding is growing faster than the AI itself.
What we can still build
Each problem above has a direct counter: making AI understandable, documenting the divide, and amplifying youth voices.
Open explanation anyone can use
The OECD and the UN both concluded in 2024 that core AI components should be governed as public commons. Open, accessible explanation of AI is part of that commons — it is the mechanism by which people can understand, question, and contest the systems that affect them.
OECD.AI 2025; UN 2024
A public record of the AI divide
Data that does not exist cannot drive policy or public understanding. We build open data experiments because no single source tracks AI adoption, transparency, and impact in a usable format. That data is free. Any researcher, journalist, or NGO can use it.
Youth voices in the conversation
The technology is moving fast. What is missing is content explaining it — produced by the generation most affected by it, in language their peers can actually understand and act on. That is what this community builds.