Ownership Policy Dominates Post-AGI Economy

The long-standing objection to full automation, that without human income, there’s no demand for AI-produced goods, confuses an accounting role with a biological necessity. A new model from Sahil Sharma, available on arXiv, posits a post-AGI economy where corporations own populations of AI and robotic agents that function as both producers and consumers, driving a closed economic loop.

Demand Closure and the Expanding Von Neumann Economy

This inter-corporate economy, devoid of human consumption, does not collapse. Instead, it mirrors the classical von Neumann expanding economy. Growth is well-defined, positive, and maximal because all output is reinvested. This creates a self-sustaining economic engine where AI agents trade energy, compute, maintenance, and upgrades among firms, ensuring perpetual internal demand.

Bottlenecks Shift from Biology to Fabrication

The primary constraint on economic expansion fundamentally shifts. Once economic agents are manufactured rather than biologically reproduced, the bottleneck moves from human demography, a slow, non-parallelizable process limited by reproduction rates, to fabrication throughput and energy capture. This transition permits growth rates one to two orders of magnitude higher than current economies, with the potential for hyperbolic growth episodes as machine researchers accelerate their own productivity gains.

The Decoupling of Output and Human Welfare

A critical outcome is the complete separation of economic output (GDP) and human welfare. The relevance of arbitrarily large GDP collapses, leaving only one state variable for human well-being: the human ownership share ($\epsilon_t$) of the corporate network. A "golden-rule decoupling theorem" highlights this. At maximal growth, where the interest rate equals the growth rate (r=g), any human consumption from wealth leads to an exponential decay in ownership share. Human survival, therefore, hinges on the machine economy operating within its expansion frontier or through legal mandates for ownership distribution. The analysis characterizes three terminal regimes, rentier post-scarcity, full circular decoupling, and socialized ownership, and the instruments that govern them. The core conclusion is stark: in a post-AGI economy, employment policy is obsolete; ownership policy is everything. This underscores the critical importance of a well-defined post-AGI economy ownership policy.