413. Ilan Strauss. AI Markets, Not Models.
Ilan Strauss
May 28, 2026
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In this episode, we speak with Dr. Ilan Strauss, co-director of the AI Disclosures Project in New York, about why AI's most consequential risks are market risks, not model risks. The dominant safety conversation asks how to see inside the model; Strauss argues the more urgent question is how AI products get optimized for commercial deployment, who controls the infrastructure those products run on, and whether the rules governing that infrastructure are open to scrutiny or privately held.
His thesis is structural: concentrated infrastructure plus closed protocols plus absent disclosure requirements produces the same extractive dynamics that defined the platform economy, except AI accelerates the concentration and extends it further. Transparency and open protocols aren't transparency for its own sake; they're the mechanisms by which markets stay competitive, accountable, and broadly value-creating rather than captured by a small number of gatekeepers.
Key ideas discussed:
The risks that matter most in AI aren't inside the model; they're in how companies optimize their products once deployed, and those optimization decisions are currently invisible to anyone outside the company.
Open infrastructure distributes power; closed infrastructure concentrates it - this was true of the early web, and AI is facing the same structural choice right now.
Transparency built into market infrastructure is more durable than regulation, because it aligns commercial incentives rather than fighting them.
Content creators are unlikely to be compensated through litigation or bilateral licensing deals, those don't create markets, they just resolve individual disputes; new market mechanisms are required.
Anything that cannot be sustained will not be sustained, AI companies depend on ongoing human content creation, and a compensation model that disincentivizes creation eventually degrades the models themselves
Dr. Ilan Strauss is the co-Director of the AI Disclosures Project. He is an Honorary Senior Fellow at the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (London), where he was head of digital economy research on a multi-year Omidyar Network funded research project. He is a Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Johannesburg. Ilan was the joint recipient of an Economic Security Project grant investigating Big Tech’s acquisitions of technological capabilities. He previously taught macroeconomics at New York University
(Division of Applied Undergraduate Studies) and at Rice University (Jones Graduate School of Business), and has consulted widely for United Nations bodies.
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