The truth is, today’s AI is built behind closed doors. A few powerful entities control the models, the data, and the outcomes. The intelligence we rely on is trained on data collected without consent, optimized behind black-box systems, and monetized without returning value to those who made it possible.
And as AI grows more capable, so does the imbalance.
The people who generate the data, the developers who train the models, the contributors who keep AI evolving — they remain invisible in the value chain. There’s no way to trace how data was used, no infrastructure to verify model behavior, and no system to reward those who power the ecosystem. It’s a systemic failure.
To fix what’s broken, we can’t retrofit old systems. The infrastructure that supports it must evolve too and it requires rethinking the fundamentals:
What is AI value? Who owns it? And how should it flow?
We need to build something entirely new. Just as DeFi redefined financial value, the AI economy needs its own foundation construct, new primitives built around data provenance & alignment, model behavior, and verifiable outcomes.
