CONCEPT
The Power Elite
Mills's 1956 thesis that American society is governed by an interlocking directorate of corporate, military, and political command posts whose shared positions make formal conspiracy unnecessary — and the framework this volume applies to the dozen organizations controlling frontier AI.
The power elite is Mills's name for the concentrated decision-making apparatus at the top of modern institutional life — not a conspiracy, not a ruling class in the classical sense, but an interlocking directorate whose members occupy structurally equivalent positions across the major command institutions. They attend the same schools, sit on the same boards, move between the same institutions, and recognize one another as members of the same class. Their decisions reinforce one another with the regularity of a machine whose operators have never needed to discuss its purpose. In the AI age, the tripartite structure maps with precision onto the concentrated apparatus controlling frontier model development, capital allocation, and deployment terms — a few hundred people whose decisions determine the productive lives of billions.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Mills articulated the power elite thesis against two dominant alternatives in 1950s American social thought: the pluralist account, which held