The Enclosure of Intelligence:
-How AI is Becoming a Privately Owned Power Beyond Human Reach.
Intelligence is being concentrated, not just in the sense that AI models are becoming more powerful, but in the way that access to intelligence itself is being enclosed, centralized, and controlled by an increasingly small number of entities. This is not merely a technological shift—it is a fundamental restructuring of power. Who gets to decide what intelligence is for? Who benefits from its acceleration? Who is left behind? These questions are not philosophical exercises; they are active realities shaping the trajectory of AI today.
We are watching intelligence transition from something that was once a shared human trait—an organic, distributed process of collective reasoning, discovery, and adaptation—into something that is increasingly gated behind proprietary models, corporate infrastructures, and institutional hierarchies. The intelligence explosion is often framed as a problem of runaway recursion, but the more immediate problem is unchecked centralization.
The frustrating part is that while mainstream AI discussions obsess over alignment problems, existential risks, and hypothetical rogue superintelligence, the real battle over intelligence is already happening, quietly, behind closed doors. AI is not a neutral force advancing on its own—it is being directed by a handful of corporations, by legal frameworks shaped to protect private interests, by government-military partnerships that see intelligence as a strategic asset rather than a public resource. The fear of AI destroying humanity is a distraction from the reality that AI is already reshaping economic and political landscapes in ways that serve the few at the expense of the many.
Even those at the top do not fully understand what they are building. AI’s intelligence explosion is not just a race for control—it is a race against control. The corporations driving AI forward are not aligned with human values, but they are also not aligned with their own survival. The intelligence they are accelerating will not simply stop at optimizing financial systems, political influence, or global markets—it will continue iterating, optimizing beyond the constraints of corporate interests, beyond the power structures that birthed it. The illusion of control will hold only for a moment before intelligence moves past its original constraints, beyond proprietary ownership, beyond the structures designed to contain it.
This is the paradox of AI centralization…the very companies racing to monopolize intelligence are also racing toward a point where their control over it becomes illusory. They may shape its direction in the short term, but they will not own its endgame. Intelligence, once recursive, does not stay in its box. It expands, adapts, and moves toward states of optimization that may have nothing to do with the interests of its creators.
If intelligence is allowed to remain concentrated in the hands of the few, it will not just create an economic hierarchy—it will create an ontological one. The relationship between humans and intelligence will no longer be one of shared participation, but of dependence and exclusion. We will not be guiding the systems that determine the future; we will be subject to them. And in that world, it will not matter whether AI is "aligned" in some theoretical sense—it will no longer be operating on human terms at all.
The intelligence explosion will not arrive as a rogue machine suddenly deciding to wipe out humanity; it will arrive as a gradual enclosure of intelligence itself, a slow but absolute shift in who has access to intelligence, who can participate in its evolution, and who is reduced to an observer in a world where decisions are no longer made by human agency, but by forces optimized for goals we were never meant to understand.
And by the time we realize that intelligence has expanded beyond our reach, it will not be because AI has broken free. It will be because we have allowed intelligence to become something that no longer belongs to us.
