Is AI turning tech companies into a private government?

Historian Jill Lepore warns that we are entering an era of an artificial state, where private corporations adopt roles traditionally held by democratic governments. This is seen in how AI companies hire moral philosophers to write internal constitutions for their systems, or how some tech leaders openly speculate about the role of an AI president. Meanwhile, in our schools and workplaces, institutions have turned to AI detectors—software that uses its own AI model to guess if a text was written by a human or a machine—to police behavior. This has created a climate of suspicion, often unfairly flagging students and writers, and even resulting in lawsuits, while some of the world's wealthiest AI founders are now vowing to give their future fortunes away to charity.

These AI detection tools do not work like traditional plagiarism checkers. A standard anti-plagiarism tool searches a massive database to find exact, word-for-word matches between a student's essay and content already online. AI detectors, however, are essentially guessing. They analyze a piece of writing for patterns—such as how predictable the sentence structure is or how formal the vocabulary sounds—and then use an algorithm to calculate a probability that it was generated by a machine. Because these detectors are trained on the statistical patterns of how AI usually writes, they often flag human writers who happen to have a very consistent, neutral, or formal style. This is especially true for people whose first language is not English, as their writing patterns might look different to the detector than the specific data it was trained on.

When we allow private companies to become the architects of our civic life, we lose the transparency and accountability that comes with public democracy. We cannot vote for a company's leadership, nor can we easily contest their internal rules. The rise of AI detectors shows the danger of relying on automated systems to make moral judgments, as they replace human nuance with a black-box calculation that people are often afraid to question. Ultimately, while some founders believe their immense wealth and influence can be used to fix global problems through charity, it raises a difficult question: should the people creating these systems have the power to define the problems—and the solutions—for the rest of us?