Who Controls AI?

AI tools exist because the companies building them have strong commercial incentives. Understanding those incentives helps you use AI with clear eyes.

Who benefits from your AI use?

Every time you use an AI tool, the company behind it benefits: from usage data, from subscription fees, from advertising, or from the model improvements your interactions enable. There is nothing wrong with this — but it is worth being aware that these systems are not neutral tools. They are products, shaped by the priorities of the organisations that build them.

Whose values are embedded?

The teams building the most widely used AI tools are predominantly based in the United States and China. The cultural values, regulatory environments, and social assumptions of those places are embedded in how these systems work. What topics they will and will not discuss, how they handle sensitive subjects, whose languages and dialects they handle well — all of these reflect choices made by specific people in specific contexts.

Concentration of power

A small number of companies — OpenAI, Google, Meta, Anthropic, Mistral — control the frontier AI models that most people use. This concentration of influence over an increasingly important technology is a legitimate subject of public debate. New Zealand has a stake in how global AI governance develops.

What you can do

Use multiple tools rather than depending entirely on one. Support calls for transparent AI governance. Stay informed about AI policy developments — in New Zealand, Australia, and globally. Your choices as a user and as a citizen matter.

You do not have to distrust AI to be a thoughtful user of it. Understanding who built it, why, and what they gain from your use of it is simply good digital citizenship.