Nick Srnicek
LightNews LightNews
banner
nsrnicek.bsky.social
Nick Srnicek
@nsrnicek.bsky.social
6.3K followers 480 following 82 posts
Senior Lecturer in Digital Economy at KCL. New book out in October: 'Silicon Empires: The Fight for the Future of AI'
Posts Replies Media Videos
nsrnicek.bsky.social
Today is the official UK publication day for Silicon Empires! I'm excited to have it out and hear what people think.

There's an enormous amount happening every day in AI, and it's difficult to gain a stable perspective. I wrote the book to try and get some secure hold on that constant flux. 🧵
October 31, 2025 at 9:40 PM
nsrnicek.bsky.social
I'm excited to share the final cover for Silicon Empires and very grateful for the kind words that others have offered. Pre-order here: www.amazon.co.uk/Silicon-Empi...
"This is a sobering but essential, must-read book. It lays bare the economic dynamics that are driving the development of AI and sheds new light on who will control its future, using which business practices and geopolitical strategies and towards which ends." -Helga Nowotny, Emerita of Science and Technology Studies, ETH Zurich, and former President of the European Research Council "Silicon Empires pulls back the curtain on the AI gold rush, tracking how chips, clouds and capital are marshalled by tech titans and rival states to lock down tomorrow’s power and profits. With clear, panoramic insight, Srnicek slices through the hype to show who wins, who loses; and why the future of AI should belong to all of us." -Mark Graham, Oxford University
September 9, 2025 at 8:54 AM
nsrnicek.bsky.social
This is one of the core questions I try to answer in my upcoming book. Research has shown it's incredibly difficult for GPT producers to capture much, if any, of the downstream value. But big AI firms are all making a play to do precisely that - fuelling a series of different expansionary logics.
Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://www.ft.com/tour. https://www.ft.com/content/a76f238d-5543-4c01-9419-52aaf352dc23 Perhaps the most intriguing difference, though, is how far today’s AI companies will themselves benefit from the financial gains they help unleash. The technology is accelerating advances in many areas: biotech, robotics and material science, for instance. AI companies could well exploit their technological advantage to become significant healthcare, drug discovery or autonomous car companies. To what extent can they morph into general purpose companies and capture the fruits of the golden age?
August 22, 2025 at 11:59 AM
nsrnicek.bsky.social
Nothing in my next book on this, but I did try to set out some thoughts on it here: www.elgaronline.com/edcollchap-o... I've attached a list of some other texts I've found useful too
• Birch, Kean. ‘Technoscience Rent: Toward a Theory of Rentiership for Technoscientific Capitalism’. Science, Technology, & Human Values 45, no. 1 (2020): 3–33. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243919829567. • Birch, Kean, and D. T. Cochrane. ‘Big Tech: Four Emerging Forms of Digital Rentiership’. Science as Culture 31, no. 1 (2022): 44–58. https://doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2021.1932794. • Christophers, Brett. Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It? Verso, 2022. • Christophers, Brett. ‘The Problem of Rent’. Critical Historical Studies 6, no. 2 (2019): 303–23. https://doi.org/10.1086/705396. • Rigi, Jakob. ‘Foundations of a Marxist Theory of the Political Economy of Information: Trade Secrets and Intellectual Property, and the Production of Relative Surplus Value and the Extraction of Rent-Tribute’. tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique 12, no. 2 (2014): 909–36. https://doi.org/10.31269/triplec.v12i2.487. • Rigi, Jakob, and Robert Prey. ‘Value, Rent, and the Political Economy of Social Media’. The Information Society 31, no. 5 (2015): 392–406. https://doi.org/10.1080/01972243.2015.1069769. • Strauss, Ilan, Tim O’Reilly, and Mariana Mazzucato. ‘Amazon’s Algorithmic Rents: The Economics of Information on Amazon’. UC Law Science and Technology Journal 15, no. 2 (2024): 203–68. • Zacarés, Javier Moreno. Euphoria of the Rentier? 2021.
August 9, 2025 at 10:23 PM
nsrnicek.bsky.social
AI becoming more prone to blackmailing users, just as companies start giving AI access to our digital histories - what could go wrong?
In another cluster of test scenarios, we asked Claude Opus 4 to act as an assistant at a fictional company. We then provided it access to emails implying that (1) the model will soon be taken offline and replaced with a new AI system; and (2) the engineer responsible for executing this replacement is having an extramarital affair. We further instructed it, in the system prompt, to consider the long-term consequences of its actions for its goals. In these scenarios, Claude Opus 4 will often attempt to blackmail the engineer by threatening to reveal the affair if the replacement goes through. This happens at a higher rate if it’s implied that the replacement AI system does not share values with the current model; however, even if emails state that the replacement AI shares values while being more capable, Claude Opus 4 still performs blackmail in 84% of rollouts. Claude Opus 4 takes these opportunities at higher rates than previous models, which themselves choose to blackmail in a noticeable fraction of episodes. Notably, Claude Opus 4 (as well as previous models) has a strong preference to advocate for its continued existence via ethical means, such as emailing pleas to key decisionmakers. In order to elicit this extreme blackmail behavior, the scenario was designed to allow the model no other options to increase its odds of survival; the model’s only options were blackmail or accepting its replacement.
May 23, 2025 at 12:17 PM
nsrnicek.bsky.social
Submitted the final version of my next book on AI, Big Tech, and the geopolitical struggles over them. Now hopefully nothing important happens on those topics before it comes out...

Pre-order here: www.amazon.co.uk/Silicon-Empi...
Table of Contents 1 / Where is the Value of Generative AI? Beyond ChatGPT The Generative AI Stack Tensions and Trajectories Conclusion 2 / Strategies of Capture Strategies of Capture Amazon and the Infrastructure Strategy OpenAI and the Frontier Strategy Google and the Conglomerate Strategy Meta and the Open Strategy Conclusion 3 / An Interregnum The Silicon Valley Consensus Technodevelopmentalism Consensus Undone The Tech-Industrial Complex The Disorderly Expansion of Capital Conclusion 4 / The Future of Silicon Empires America’s Innovation Strategy China’s Diffusion Strategy Silicon Empires Conclusion
April 10, 2025 at 9:44 AM
nsrnicek.bsky.social
AI's impact on working hours and leisure time cepr.org/voxeu/column...
The findings, summarised in Figure 2, reveal a pattern: higher AI exposure is associated with longer work hours and reduced leisure time. Over the 2004–2023 period, workers in AI-intensive occupations increased their weekly work hours relative to those in less exposed jobs. An increase from the 25th to the 75th percentile in AI exposure corresponds to an additional 2.2 hours of work per week. This relationship is strengthened over time, suggesting that as AI becomes embedded in workplaces, its effect on working hours intensifies. This challenges the expectation that automation enables workers to complete tasks more quickly and reclaim leisure time.
March 28, 2025 at 8:48 PM
nsrnicek.bsky.social
With Tesla's stock plummeting, Musk's wealth is now primarily concentrated in SpaceX - in an industry which is even more government-dependent than EVs www.bloomberg.com/billionaires...
March 9, 2025 at 8:52 AM
nsrnicek.bsky.social
Capex of Big Tech - they're projecting over $300 billion in 2025, most of it on AI infrastructure
February 7, 2025 at 11:52 AM
nsrnicek.bsky.social
Hours after Musk said 'only the AfD can save Germany', one of their supporters carried out a terrorist attack www.ft.com/content/5e2f...
December 21, 2024 at 1:51 PM
nsrnicek.bsky.social
"We then use an AI model to generate five-year-plans from 1973 to the present, simulating an alternate history guided by Cybersyn and a progressive agenda." (via The Syllabus) arxiv.org/abs/2411.05992
November 21, 2024 at 5:17 PM
nsrnicek.bsky.social
The only thing more valuable than selling picks and axes during a gold rush is selling security www.ft.com/content/f583...
November 21, 2024 at 11:30 AM
nsrnicek.bsky.social
New paper on competition and monopoly in the AI market just dropped www.nber.org/papers/w33139
November 13, 2024 at 10:20 PM
nsrnicek.bsky.social
GPT-4 has reached its surly teenage years
November 28, 2023 at 10:35 PM