AI economics
How AI shifts the distribution of economic output — who gains, who loses, and what policies can respond.
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AI economics studies what happens to wages, employment, and firm profits when machines can do more cognitive work. The central tension: productivity gains from automation tend to concentrate at the top (capital owners, high-skill workers) while displacing routine and some non-routine jobs. Labor's share of output can fall even as total output rises. The hard part is measurement — displacement and creation happen at different speeds, in different sectors, and the counterfactual is unobservable. Policy proposals (robot taxes, universal basic income, wage subsidies) are attempts to redistribute gains before the distribution hardens.
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Anthropic's $15B compute bill
SpaceX's IPO filing is the first audited look at what a frontier lab pays to run: Anthropic owes $1.25 billion a month through 2029 — to a Musk company training its rival.
AI chips get an A-rating
CoreWeave borrowed $8.5 billion against its GPU clusters at a rate normally reserved for utilities and railroads — the first time graphics chips have been rated safe enough for pension funds to lend against.
The penny-warrant template
Meta committed to roughly $100 billion of AMD chips and handed AMD a warrant for 160 million shares at a penny each — the same terms OpenAI signed five months earlier, now run a second time.
SpaceX's $60B option on Cursor
SpaceX has taken — not yet exercised — a $60 billion option to buy the AI coding tool Cursor, whose flagship model turns out to run partly on a Chinese open-weight base it never disclosed.
The Jevons bill comes due
AI inference keeps getting cheaper per token, yet the bills are climbing fast — because every price cut invites buyers to spend the savings on more tokens, and then some.
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