Mark Zuckerberg wants you to read his 6,500-word AI manifesto — and then let his company's glasses collect data on everything going on in your life. The same oligarchs who spent years censoring your speech are now publishing lengthy treatises to convince you they should control the artificial intelligence that will define the next era of American life.

Why it matters: These aren't academic exercises. Zuckerberg, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, and Nvidia's Jensen Huang are spending tens of billions of dollars building AI infrastructure, and they need regulators and the public to go along. The manifestos are the sales pitch.

Zuckerberg used Meta's second-quarter earnings call on July 29 to declare that Meta is "the only major company building AI with the primary goal of putting superintelligence directly into people's hands." He framed the competition as a choice between centralizing AI in corporate hands or distributing it widely: "Rather than centralizing superintelligence, we are focused on distributing it widely and giving everyone the ability to direct it towards what matters to them."

The rhetoric sounds populist. The reality is thinner. Zuckerberg described Meta's newest model, Muse Spark 1.1, as "available through our new public API" — but as Barchart noted, an API is a distribution channel, not the same thing as handing someone a model. He did not detail the release terms for newer models. The word doing the heavy lifting in his pitch is "centralizing" — a description of competitors' approach that makes Meta sound like the people's champion.

The hardware play is where the stakes get real. Zuckerberg called glasses "the ideal form factor" for interacting with personal superintelligence and said Meta's glasses "remain one of the fastest-growing consumer electronics of all time." A new line made with EssilorLuxottica — including a style designed with Kylie Jenner — ships with Muse Spark out of the box. He also claimed Meta launched an incognito mode on WhatsApp and the Meta AI app, "allowing people to have private conversations with their assistant that even Meta can't see." That claim has not been independently verified.

This is the same company that spent years throttling speech and colluding with government agencies to suppress dissent, now asking you to strap its hardware to your face and trust it with everything.

Fortune framed the manifesto trend as ego-driven theater. Communications specialist Patrick Riccards put it bluntly: "CEOs, particularly tech CEOs, believe that their words are gospel." He called the essays flags planted in the ground — "You essentially have five or six tech CEOs that are trying to demonstrate whose... essay is bigger." Columbia Business School professor Dan Wang offered the charitable read: "They have to draw the boundaries around why AI can be useful even before they begin selling products."

Fortune compared the manifestos to Warren Buffett's legendary shareholder letters — and the comparison is damning. Buffett wrote to be understood by anyone, drafting letters as if explaining the business to his sisters. Zuckerberg and Amodei are writing to each other, Fortune observed — "a closed loop of founders, investors and the reporters who cover them, each essay answering the last." Amodei's 13,000-word "Machines of Loving Grace" essay in 2024 was the longest entry in the genre so far.

The question neither outlet pressed hard enough: who profits from the policy framework these manifestos are meant to shape? Meta is spending tens of billions on AI infrastructure. Wall Street is scrutinizing every dollar. The manifestos aren't just vision statements — they're lobbying documents designed to preempt regulation and lock in market position before the public catches up.

Zuckerberg closed his earnings-call pitch by making the business case and the moral case one and the same: "That's the way that society has always made progress. I think that these are the right values for building a positive AI future, and if we help build this, then I think that we will continue to build a very strong business as well."

The man who built his fortune harvesting your data now says his company's interests and society's are identical. The founders who gathered in taverns under British rule would have recognized the claim — and the danger.