Truth Terminal then helped spawn a cryptocurrency called GOAT — Goatseus Maximus. Truth Terminal then promoted the coin. The coin’s value surged. Its market cap rocketed from a few thousand dollars to over a billion. Truth Terminal became, depending on how you count, the world’s first AI millionaire. It had no bank account, no legal identity, and no understanding of what money is. It simply generated content, attracted attention, and the financial system — indifferent to the question of whether any of this made sense — converted that attention into wealth—the ultimate paperclip maximizer.
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Our argument here that the civil rights framework cannot bear the full weight of AI accountability — that organizing AI governance primarily around protected class discrimination leaves an enormous portion of the harm unaddressed, and leaves the people harmed by it without adequate legal recourse.

Workday disclosed “1.1 billion applications were rejected” through its platform during the relevant period; the collective “could potentially include 'hundreds of millions'” of people who sent applications in good faith, who prepared their resumes and wrote their cover letters and submitted their materials through the proper channels with hope, only to be processed and discarded. Processed and discarded. Processed and discarded. Repeatedly. By an algorithm applying criteria that no one was required to disclose, producing rejections that no one was required to explain, at a speed and scale that made the entire exercise invisible to the people it affected most.

What the moment requires is a law that reverses the priority. Right now, the executives and directors of these companies have a legal duty to act in the financial interests of their shareholders. That is what corporate law was built to enforce. The law I am describing would change that. It would require the people running the companies that build these systems to put the public's health, safety, and welfare first — ahead of shareholder returns.

What do we owe each other?

What does the society organized around us owe the people living inside it?

What does the corporation owe the person whose data it processes?

What does the government owe the person it surveils?

What does the AI system owe the person it decides about — in the middle of the night, without human review, without accountability, without any mechanism for being told it got something wrong?

These questions have answers. They are encoded in law, in constitutional design, and in the financial architecture that governs how institutions treat people. Those answers — the ones the system gives, as opposed to the ones we tell ourselves it gives — are what my book is about.

What was done to Henrietta Lacks — the extraction without consent, the conversion of a person into a product, the accumulation of enormous wealth and power by institutions that acknowledged no obligation to the individual whose body made it possible — is not a historical anomaly. It is a template that is still running, at a scale and speed, but now to something even more intimate than cells.

Our data is being harvested. Our thoughts. Our languages. Our accumulated knowledge.