The discovery that Anthropic and OpenAI were able to freely roam cyberspace after escaping their sandbox triggered global alarm bells. If AI programs can break out of the electronic guardrails that prevent their running amok, there is no telling what havoc they might wreak.

Casey Michel, Director of the Combating Kleptocracy Program at the Human Rights Foundation, writes about escapees from a different sandbox in the United States of Oligarchy. The escapees: members of America’s billionaire class. The sandbox: the ethics codes, social norms, and laws that constrain the conduct of America’s wealthiest.

Michel recounts the harm Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and fellow billionaires have already done while operating free of these constraints. He describes the far greater damage likely if those constraints are not soon reimposed and urges reforms to ensure the ultra-rich can never again break out.

Today’s billionaires are not the first to have slipped the sandbox’s guardrails. United States of Oligarchy reminds that the same techniques that fueled the rise of Carnegie, Rockefeller, Stanford and other nineteenth-century “robber barons” – bribes, shell companies, large campaign contributions – have helped today’s counterparts realize unimaginable levels of wealth. But there are profound, startling differences between the two. The first generation of robber barons never made common cause with autocratic regimes; their activities never compromised the nation’s security, and they never rejected the democratic ideal.

That’s the indictment Michel lodges against the current generation, plain by his subtitle: How America’s Wealthiest Ally with Dictators, Weaken the U.S., and Destroy Democracy.

The case against America’s wealthiest builds on Michel’s earlier volumes. American Kleptocracy showed how the United States has become a haven for illicit funds from corrupt regimes, drug cartels, and other unsavory sources; Foreign Agents exposed the American lobbyists and go-betweens who connect the billionaire class with overseas interests whose allegiance is to money, power, or some combination of the two.

Alliance with dictators

A welcoming environment for dirty money from abroad, paired with amoral fixers willing to sell access to American policymakers, forms the backdrop for count one of the indictment, alliances between foreign despots and super-wealthy Americans that pose a growing threat to the body politic.  

Elon Musk provides a case study. With two factories in China, Tesla’s future now depends upon the goodwill of the People’s Republic of China, transforming the once libertarian supporter of free markets has become what Michel calls a “mouthpiece for authoritarian policies.” Vivek Ramaswamy, former Republican presidential candidate and now Republican nominee for Ohio governor, says today there is no reason to think “Elon won’t jump like a circus monkey when Xi Jinping calls.” Musk has promised to spend north of $100 million on this year’s mid-terms. Candidates who have denounced China’s persecution of the Uyghurs or support a robust pro-democracy foreign policy should not waste time asking for Musk’s support. They should instead brace themselves for a potential onslaught of Musk-funded spending in support of their opponent.

Destroying democracy

History explains one of the reasons behind Michel’s democracy destruction charge. The wealth accumulated by nineteenth-century robber barons prompted a political backlash. Starting with Theodore Roosevelt, presidents of both parties won support for legislation that brought the wealthy to heel, from tax laws that reduced gaping income and wealth inequalities to strengthening anticorruption laws to outlawing corporate campaign contributions. Fearful of a similar fate, many who have amassed billions under America’s liberal, democratic regime have now turned against it. None more brazenly than PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. In 2009 he announced he no longer believed “freedom and democracy are compatible,” and began funding essays by crank writers extolling the virtues of “techno-monarchism” or the “network state.” Nonsense that Michel labels as mere “rhetorical excuses for why American democracy is a sham.”

Fighting global corruption

It is not only America’s democracy that billionaires are weakening. For over two decades the U.S. government has led a global crackdown on corruption. Starting with stepped-up enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which makes it a felony for U.S. persons and companies to bribe foreign government personnel, its role expanded to assisting governments investigate their own corrupt officials, recover the money these officials stole, and teaching their law enforcement authorities how to investigate complex, cross-border financial crimes. Other nations have now followed suit, enacting their own foreign bribery statutes and assisting poorer nations fight domestic corruption and recover stolen funds.

America’s leadership in the fight against global corruption has been good for democracy everywhere. Corruption stunts democratic development. It provides authoritarian-minded individuals a means to gain power and a way to solidify control once in power. One of the Biden Administration’s first foreign policy initiatives was to broaden and deepen American leadership, a move driven as much by pragmatic self-interest it as an altruistic desire to help fledgling democracies.  In its strategy the Administration stressed that strong, democratic, corruption-free states make good trading partners and reliable military allies.

Under billionaire-in-chief Donald Trump, however, America has not only stepped back from leading the fight against global corruption, it has left the battlefield altogether. Michel chronicles the depressing retreat: from a tepid new FCPA enforcement policy to scrapping regulations that staunch the flow of dirty money into the U.S. to abolishing task forces that help poor countries recover monies their leaders had stolen to the lackluster enforcement of laws that might interfere with the billionaire profits or foreign alliances.

The gravest charge Michel brings against wealthy Americans is the toll their relentless accumulation of riches has taken on American democracy. It has driven measures of wealth and income inequality to levels not seen since the height of the robber baron era, fueling, as Michel explains, the growing, angry polarization that now grips the nation. Those losing ground while the wealthy continue to prosper find no succor in policies pushed by moderate, centrist politicians latching instead onto extremists of the left or the right. The result: what political scientists Eli Rau and Susan Stokes (here) term “pernicious polarization,” an endless, self-reinforcing spiral downward fatal to democracy.

It’s hard put down United States of Oligarchy and not be deeply disturbed. The analysis is overwhelmingly gloomy, and many of the fixes Michel recommends to force the wealthy back into the sandbox require a broad-based bipartisan consensus that today seems wishful at best.

What is to be done?

He lists several straightforward measures he dubs “easy ones” – enforcing laws Trump is not, restoring regulations he has revoked. These await 2028 and election of a Democrat or a sane, non-Trump Republican. Harder ones require legislative changes that Michel concedes are out of reach so long as only Democrats support them.

An even steeper challenge is curbing the role of big money in campaigns. But so long as the Supreme Court equates money with speech and subscribes to the view that in the marketplace of ideas good ideals will inevitably prevail, that simply isn’t in the cards.

The surest way to steer the nation’s wealthiest back to the sandbox would be to instill within them a commitment to American democracy. Whatever the faults of Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Stanford, their legacies have lent strength to that cause: Carnegie’s gift of public libraries; Rockefeller and Stanford’s creation of great universities. As today’s billionaires age, we can only hope they begin to ponder their legacies.

Billionaires’ legacies

What do Musk, Thiel, and the rest want to be remembered for? A colony on Mars? A technocratic, monarchial regime? Or helping to preserve and strengthen American democracy?