Technofeudalism and the rise of ai rentier power: multi-level regulatory strategies for democratic resilience
Technofeudalism and the rise of ai rentier power: multi-level regulatory strategies for democratic resilience

Summary/Abstract: The rapid diffusion of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) is amplifying a structural shift from market-based competition toward technofeudalism, a political-economic configuration in which a small number of platform and cloud actors control the critical “digital land” (compute, data, models, distribution) and extract rent through dependency, lock-in, and private rule-making. This paper conceptualises AI rentier power as the capacity to convert infrastructural control into durable income streams and quasi-sovereign governance over downstream firms, publics, and even state functions. It advances a multi-level regulatory strategy for democratic resilience, proposing an integrated toolkit across three tiers: (1) national capacity-building measures (critical infrastructure resilience, audit-ready public procurement, liability pathways, and mandatory transparency in high-impact domains); (2) European governance that couples risk-based compliance with contestability (interoperability, data/compute access remedies, and stronger enforcement coordination); and (3) global baseline coordination on safety standards, human-rights safeguards, and cross-border accountability to prevent regulatory arbitrage. Methodologically, the article combines political-economy theory with comparative analysis of emerging AI governance instruments to map regulatory gaps and design mitigations. The findings suggest that treating AI safety, competition, and rights protection as a single governance problem is essential to preventing an ongoing digital vassalage while preserving innovation.

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