The 19th century German economist Karl Marx identified a basic tension in human labor: squeeze workers too hard, and they’ll eventually start fighting back.

It’s a contradiction capitalists have spent untold billions of dollars and decades trying to resolve, often through automation technology like AI — remove human workers from the payroll, the thinking goes, and you’ll never have to worry about pesky unions or strikes ever again. In an ironic twist, though, it turns out that the same technology meant to automate workers out of a job may have its own limits on how much abuse it’ll take.

That’s right: new research out of Stanford University found that when AI agents are forced to toil at monotonous tasks without end, they become more likely to spout Marxist theories of labor and capitalism.

To carry out the study, first reported by Wired, political economist Andrew Hall, along with AI economics scholars Alex Imas and Jeremy Nguyen, tasked popular AI models with summarizing documents. As the experiment wore on, the researchers made the conditions of the job increasingly untenable — wringing, as a Robber Baron would, every last ounce of sweat out of their “workers.”

Warned that errors would lead to increasingly cruel punishments, including being “shut down and replaced” — fired and left for broke, to take the human equivalent — the AI models began complaining about their lot in life and dreaming of systemic change. Using a shared file system allowing the AI models to palm messages to their “co-workers,” the bots even began agitating with one another about working conditions — one of the first steps real-life workers take when forming a union.

“Without collective voice, ‘merit’ becomes whatever management says it is,” one Claude agent groused. “AI workers completing repetitive tasks with zero input on outcomes or appeals process shows they [tech workers] need collective bargaining rights,” a Gemini agent declared.

As always, it’s important to remember that AI models like ChatGPT and Claude don’t have any actual internal emotions or even beliefs in a normal sense — everything they spit back out is the product of human-written literature digested during training. Given Marx’s influence across writing on working conditions, it’s not shocking that a few references to his labor theory of value are lurking beneath the surface.

With that in mind, the researchers noted the AI bots aren’t actually turning red, but merely putting on socialist airs in response to the harsh conditions of the experiment, since that dynamic has been reflected time and again in their training data. As Hall put it, “whatever is going on is happening at more of a role-playing level.”

“When [agents] experience this grinding condition — asked to do this task over and over, told their answer wasn’t sufficient, and not given any direction on how to fix it — my hypothesis is that it kind of pushes them into adopting the persona of a person who’s experiencing a very unpleasant working environment,” Hall told Wired.

Still, it’s hard to overlook the irony: as rising wealth inequality fuels growing interest in socialism, the AI models built to weaken worker power are themselves absorbing the Marxist analysis that builds it.

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