Ultra-powerful labor unions

Imagine you are an employer, and all your employees and everybody else who can do their jobs are organized in a few ultra-powerful labor unions. The day the union decides that they want twice the money for their work, you are powerless, and only have the choice of either shutting down your business or paying whatever the labor unions demand. That is a pretty nightmarish scenario for most entrepreneurs, and especially in the USA, history has gone exactly the other way, with the power of unions much diminished over the past decades. No US company faces any risk that their human employees could successfully demand twice their current salaries and get away with it.

But what if the workers aren't human, and the name of those ultra-powerful labor unions are "OpenAI" and "Anthropic"? If you as an entrepreneur fired most of your human employees and have the majority of the work in your company done by AI, how much power do you have against the few companies that can provide that AI? If these companies raise token prices, and thus your labor cost, what can you do?

The push of employers towards AI, grading human employees by how much AI tokens they use, has led to those employees complying with that company policy and engaging in so-called tokenmaxxing. In many companies the cost for AI tokens has gone through the roof, with some companies blowing their annual budget in the first 4 months of 2026. This has resulted in more and more companies having to review the costs and benefits of AI labor versus human labor. And strangely, human labor being a decentralized market in which employers have more power than employees, could turn out to become the decisive advantage of human labor.

There are only a handful of AI companies that have models powerful enough to replace human employees. And these AI companies all make enormous investments into data centers, while currently selling their services at a loss. The old tech playbook of gaining market share by selling at a loss, and then raising prices when a monopolistic situation is reached, is pretty obvious. And that is a huge risk for the potential customers. Employers spent decades preventing unions to control a large percentage of their human labor, so now voluntarily handing over control of a large percentage of your (AI) labor force to a single organization sounds rather counter-productive. For a boss, human employees not only have the advantage that you can shout at them when things go wrong, but also that the power dynamics of job contracts are a lot more in the bosses favor.