MIT AI Risk Repository · domain 6: Socioeconomic & Environmental
6.1 Power centralization and unfair distribution of benefits
AI-driven concentration of power and resources within certain entities or groups, especially those with access to or ownership of powerful AI systems, leading to inequitable distribution of benefits and increased societal inequality.
- 54
- 12
- 6
- 2
| Label | Value |
|---|---|
| Human | 35 |
| Other | 13 |
| AI | 3 |
| Not coded | 3 |
| Label | Value |
|---|---|
| Intentional | 18 |
| Unintentional | 17 |
| Other | 16 |
| Not coded | 3 |
| Label | Value |
|---|---|
| Post-deployment | 25 |
| Other | 24 |
| Not coded | 3 |
| Pre-deployment | 2 |
| Label | Value |
|---|---|
| 2016 | 1 |
| 2017 | 1 |
| 2018 | 2 |
| 2021 | 1 |
| 2025 | 1 |
| Label | Value |
|---|---|
| Risk Category | 13 |
| Risk Sub-Category | 41 |
Risk entries
Browse and export all- Monopolisation
"Monopolisation - Abuse of market power through the control of prices, thereby limiting competition and creating unfair barriers to entry."
- Power concentration
"Power concentration - Amplification of concentration of economic and/or political wealth and power, potentially resulting in increased inequality and instability."
- Potential exploitation by totalitarian regimes
- Corporate power may impeded effective governance
"The increasing power and influence of large corporations may make effective governance difficult. There exists a power asymmetry between corporate entities profiting from LLMs and other social groups...
- Global AI Divide
"General- purpose AI research and development is currently concentrated in a few Western countries and China. This ‘AI Divide’ is multicausal, but in part related to limited access to computing power...
- Market concentration risks and single points of failure
"Market power is concentrated among a few companies that are the only ones able to build the leading general- purpose AI models. Widespread adoption of a few general- purpose AI models and systems by...
- Global AI R&D divide
"Large companies in countries with strong digital infrastructure lead in general- purpose AI R&D, which could lead to an increase in global inequality and dependencies. For example, in 2023, the major...
- Market concentration and single points of failure
"Market shares for general- purpose AI tend to be highly concentrated among a few players, which can create vulnerability to systemic failures. The high degree of market concentration can invest a sma...
- Increased power concentration and inequality
"Power and inequality: there are a lot of pathways through which AI seems likely to increase power concentration and inequality, though there is little analysis of the potential long- term impacts of...
- Unequal distribution of harms and benefits
"AI-driven industries seem likely to tend towards monopoly and could result in huge economic gains for a few actors: there seems to be a feedback loop whereby actors with access to more AI-relevant re...
- Exacerbating Market Power and Concentration
"Major tech companies have also been the dominant players in developing new generative AI systems because training generative AI models requires massive swaths of data, computing power, and technical...
- Equality and inequality
"AI assistant technology, like any service that confers a benefit to a user for a price, has the potential to disproportionately benefit economically richer individuals who can afford to purchase acce...
- Access and Opportunity risks
"The most serious access-related risks posed by advanced AI assistants concern the entrenchment and exacerbation of existing inequalities (World Inequality Database) or the creation of novel, previous...
- Entrenchment and exacerbation of existing inequalities
"The most serious access-related risks posed by advanced AI assistants concern the entrenchment and exacerbation of existing inequalities (World Inequality Database) or the creation of novel, previous...
- Current access risks
"At the same time, and despite this overall trend, AI systems are also not easily accessible to many communities. Such direct inaccessibility occurs for a variety of reasons, including: purposeful non...
- Future access risks
"AI assistants currently tend to perform a limited set of isolated tasks: tools that classify or rank content execute a set of predefined rules or provide constrained suggestions, and chatbots are oft...
- Emergent access risks
"Emergent access risks are most likely to arise when current and novel capabilities are combined. Emergent risks can be difficult to foresee fully (Ovadya and Whittlestone, 2019; Prunkl et al., 2021)...
- Design of AI
"ethical concerns regarding how AI is designed and who designs it"
- Uniformity in the AI field
"This group of concerns represents 2% of the sample and highlights two central issues: Western centrality and cultural difference, and unequal participation."
- Negative Externality Domains (Other harms from AI development and use)
- Societal inequality (individuals and companies who develop the best AIs get disproportionately powerful)
- Geopolitical harms (potential for conflict due to power imbalances)
- Single point of failure
"Intense competition leads to one company gaining a technical edge, exploiting this to the point its model controls, or is the basis for other models controlling, multiple key systems. Lack of safety,...
- Concentration of market power (Trend toward market concentration)
"In the generative AI market, barriers to entry are very high. Developers need access to vast volumes of data, computational resources, technical expertise, and capital. Large technology companies wit...
- Concentration of market power (Negative effects of increased market concentration)
"The concentration of AI assets—encompassing data, hardware, and expertise—within a small group of global tech firms raises many concerns.564 Such a situation may stifle healthy competition, impede in...