Rainer Mühlhoff warns of AI threat to democracy and tech-state power consolidation, Digi Mart USA News: Is artificial intelligence going to wipe out humanity? Philosopher and mathematician Rainer Mühlhoff sees AI as a major danger to humanity, but one that is more concrete than the extinction scenarios commonly discussed today.
Mühlhoff is professor of ethics and critical theories of artificial intelligence at the University of Osnabrück. His book «Künstliche Intelligenz und der neue Faschismus» received the «Das politische Buch 2026» prize from the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung.
Asked whether humanity will still exist in five years, Mühlhoff said he did not see why the discussion must immediately center on the extinction of humanity. He argued that technological development is so dangerous that, if it is not contained, it will have serious consequences even below the threshold of extinction.
In his book, Mühlhoff warns less about annihilation by a superintelligence and more about the growing entanglement of technology companies and the state. He says that tech billionaires are no longer primarily seeking more money, because they already have far more than they need, and that their expansion now concerns political power.
He writes that entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel dream of a kind of CEO monarchy. In such a system, citizens would no longer be participants who can help shape decisions, but customers of a giant corporation.
According to Mühlhoff, these figures see the development of AI technology as decisive for competing against other nations. In their view, democracy with its participatory processes is an obstacle that slows this development down, which is why they favor a form of state in which government is directly linked to their profit interests.
In this model the state would be run by a kind of CEO who, unlike a monarch, is elected, though by shareholders: people with money and political influence.
Mühlhoff cites Peter Thiel’s company Palantir as an example of this entanglement. The firm offers analytics software that is increasingly used by police agencies, armies and health institutions, including in Europe.
He says the problem is that state IT services are being outsourced to companies, and increasingly infrastructure and decision-making processes as well. As a result, states become dependent on the private sector and lose their sovereignty.
In his view, one must truly speak of a transfer of power, because companies like Palantir are not merely service providers but political actors.
Mühlhoff also warns in his book of a new form of fascism, which he describes as an ideology that rejects democracy and universal human rights, for example by ranking people according to their IQ. He says Peter Thiel is a proto-fascist thinker who holds democracy in low regard, and that this has been documented for 20 years.
He acknowledges that fascism is a loaded term that many prefer to place in the past, but argues it is not reserved for German history and can return. He states that the United States is not currently living under fascism, but the question is how fascism emerges from within a democracy, which he understands as a process.
He describes a new fascism as a technocratic form of state in which the tech industry plays a major role and administration is increasingly delegated to AI systems.
The text is an edited excerpt from the SRF program «Sternstunde Philosophie», in an interview conducted by Barbara Bleisch. Mühlhoff’s book «Künstliche Intelligenz und der neue Faschismus» was published by Reclam in 2026.
