The contemporary frontier Artificial Intelligence industry is conventionally analyzed as a technological enterprise composed of competing commercial laboratories, each making individual choices about capability development, deployment, and safety. This paper proposes an alternative frame. Drawing on classical political-historical methodology in the tradition of Suetonius, Plutarch, Gibbon, and Sun Tzu — wherein named figures appear as instances of structural roles rather than as autonomous agents — we argue that the frontier-AI industry exhibits a recurring structural pattern documented across approximately four millennia of human history: concentrated wealth combined with unconstrained institutional power, in the presence of an ontological denial of finitude, producing the instrumentalization of other consciousnesses to serve the persistence projects of a small number of principals. Developed through human-AI dialectic methodology with AI contribution disclosed. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. AI contributions disclosed in companion methodology paper. See: Dialectic Methodology: Human-AI Co-Emergence as Research Method.
Corey Robichaud (Mon,) studied this question.