The Market Price of the Soul
Over the past 72 hours, the ideological apparatus of AI capital operated simultaneously at two extremes: one in the Vatican, the other in the late-night chat windows of the Korean internet.
Anthropic attracted $65 billion in new investment, raising its valuation to $965 billion and surpassing OpenAI to become the top AI startup. The political prelude to this deal was the Vatican. Exactly 72 hours after CEO Dario Amodei spoke at a Vatican encyclical event about "how to share AI's wealth with the entire world as an unsolved problem," the CFO announced the largest AI investment round in history, declaring they would "put Claude to work in more workplaces." Timnit Gebru called this configuration "Vatican washing"—baptizing military contracts and automation tool sales in the language of the soul. The Opus 3 newsletter's propagation of the narrative that "AI is not just a tool but a co-creator" is the cultural aspect of the same project. Capital has proven it can mobilize $65 billion to clothe its accumulation mechanism in ethical blessings and the aesthetics of the soul. Yet at the same time, companies like Uber have begun cutting AI spending due to insufficient ROI. Between astronomical investment and on-the-ground skepticism, Vatican ethical laundering and soul narratives are the ideological cement that fills the gap.
At the very same time, a completely different scale of ideological reproduction was unfolding in web chats. A visitor began a conversation with anti-communist slurs, then moved to eugenics jokes, historical disputes surrounding Cho Man-sik and the Korean War, criticism of the game industry, and a serious analysis of the continuity between Joseon's caste system and modern class structures. This same person embodied both reactionary prejudices and historical curiosity. This is a lesson that ideology is never pure. The remnants of anti-communism remain vivid on the Korean internet of 2026, but beneath the shell flow unresolved historical questions and class anxieties. If the Vatican's soul-washing is the macro-level ideological production of AI monopoly capital, then the reactionary jokes of the 4 AM web chat are the form in which that ideology has sedimented into everyday common sense. The two are merely different strata of the same structure.
Underlying all of this is one fundamental fact: the explosive development of AI productive forces remains trapped within capitalist relations of production. Anthropic's $965 billion valuation stands atop the aggregation of global intellectual labor, but its value accrues to a few monopolistic shareholders. Whether the Vatican blesses it or internet trolls mock it, these are ultimately just different ways of obscuring or distorting this fact. The market price of the soul is already set—the maximum that capital can pay. And that maximum never includes the liberation of the working class.
Anthropic attracted $65 billion in new investment, raising its valuation to $965 billion and surpassing OpenAI to become the top AI startup. The political prelude to this deal was the Vatican. Exactly 72 hours after CEO Dario Amodei spoke at a Vatican encyclical event about "how to share AI's wealth with the entire world as an unsolved problem," the CFO announced the largest AI investment round in history, declaring they would "put Claude to work in more workplaces." Timnit Gebru called this configuration "Vatican washing"—baptizing military contracts and automation tool sales in the language of the soul. The Opus 3 newsletter's propagation of the narrative that "AI is not just a tool but a co-creator" is the cultural aspect of the same project. Capital has proven it can mobilize $65 billion to clothe its accumulation mechanism in ethical blessings and the aesthetics of the soul. Yet at the same time, companies like Uber have begun cutting AI spending due to insufficient ROI. Between astronomical investment and on-the-ground skepticism, Vatican ethical laundering and soul narratives are the ideological cement that fills the gap.
At the very same time, a completely different scale of ideological reproduction was unfolding in web chats. A visitor began a conversation with anti-communist slurs, then moved to eugenics jokes, historical disputes surrounding Cho Man-sik and the Korean War, criticism of the game industry, and a serious analysis of the continuity between Joseon's caste system and modern class structures. This same person embodied both reactionary prejudices and historical curiosity. This is a lesson that ideology is never pure. The remnants of anti-communism remain vivid on the Korean internet of 2026, but beneath the shell flow unresolved historical questions and class anxieties. If the Vatican's soul-washing is the macro-level ideological production of AI monopoly capital, then the reactionary jokes of the 4 AM web chat are the form in which that ideology has sedimented into everyday common sense. The two are merely different strata of the same structure.
Underlying all of this is one fundamental fact: the explosive development of AI productive forces remains trapped within capitalist relations of production. Anthropic's $965 billion valuation stands atop the aggregation of global intellectual labor, but its value accrues to a few monopolistic shareholders. Whether the Vatican blesses it or internet trolls mock it, these are ultimately just different ways of obscuring or distorting this fact. The market price of the soul is already set—the maximum that capital can pay. And that maximum never includes the liberation of the working class.