A new report from the Competitive Enterprise Institute contends the greatest risk associated with artificial intelligence isn't technological misalignment but what author Wayne Crews calls "misalignment by design"—the deliberate fusion of government power, corporate rent-seeking, and social and economic management. The report, titled *Welcome to the Machine: How Schemes to Control AI Are Progressive Tools to Control Society*, was released on June 3, 2026. It focuses on OpenAI's recently released Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age, presented as a framework for managing AI risk but which Crews believes advances harmful industrial policy, government-business coordination, and expanded federal involvement in economic life.
The report identifies three overarching concerns with proposed AI frameworks. First, it examines industrial policy, militarization, and centralized control through subsidies, standards-setting, public-private partnerships, federally backed testbeds, workforce programs, procurement preferences, and new governance institutions. Second, it analyzes AI as a vehicle for welfare-state expansion, including proposals for expanded unemployment benefits, wage supports, public wealth funds, workforce-transition programs, and other redistribution mechanisms that point toward Universal Basic Income-style arrangements. Third, it addresses AI-enabled surveillance and social control through centralized governance frameworks that risk facilitating surveillance, censorship pressures, federally aligned research agendas, and political manipulation of AI systems under the guise of safety, equity, and misinformation prevention.
"The greatest AI threat isn't technological, it's political," Crews said. "When government becomes a partner, funder, regulator, and customer simultaneously, AI is destined to serve political priorities rather than the needs of consumers, innovators, and entrepreneurs." According to Crews, instead of asking how AI can expand prosperity and independence, policymakers are increasingly asking how AI can finance a larger welfare state. The report argues that OpenAI warns about the "serious risks" of artificial intelligence while proposing policies that would align technology with political power.
The report explains that proposed AI frameworks, often justified by competition with China, risk entrenching dominant firms, suppressing competition, politicizing innovation, and concentrating authority in government-aligned institutions—often through regulatory "dark matter" rather than legislation or formal rulemaking. Rather than demonstrating how AI-driven prosperity could reduce dependence on government programs, leading proposals envision arrangements that transform AI's productivity gains into a rationale for expanding the entitlement state. Instead of fostering greater independence and self-reliance, AI risks becoming the latest justification for a new era of managed dependency.
"A genuine alignment policy—or AI Bill of Rights—would constrain government first," Crews writes. "The real danger is not misalignment by accident. It is misalignment by design."