There is a move being perfected in Silicon Valley right now: take a network of humans, rebrand them as sensors, and sell the resulting data upstream. Uber's CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga let the strategy slip at TechCrunch's StrictlyVC event, describing a plan to convert millions of drivers into a passive cartographic layer for autonomous vehicle companies. The drivers are not told their bodies and vehicles are becoming instruments of a different commercial transaction entirely.
Platform Labor as Passive Capital
This is not novel, exactly. The Atlantic's piece on deepfake fraud makes a parallel argument about OpenAI: users generate prompts, OpenAI harvests behavioral data, and the resulting models are licensed to enterprises the users never interact with. The gig worker's dashboard and the casual ChatGPT user's chat window are structurally identical extraction points. A 2022 paper in New Media and Society by Srnicek and Williams described this as "platform rentierism," where the value is not the service but the metadata the service generates. Both Uber and OpenAI are running that playbook at scale in 2026.
The AI Infrastructure Arms Race Behind the Scenes
Replit's Amjad Masad flagged at the same event that every company will eventually become a cybersecurity company, because the attack surface explodes as AI agents proliferate. What he did not say, but implied, is that every company with a user base will also become a data company. Meta's acquisition of robotics startup Assured Robot Intelligence fits this logic too: the humanoid body is just another sensor platform. TurboFund's investor signal intelligence is tracking heavy conviction in AI/Operating Systems this week, with Sam Altman calling for internet protocols to be rebuilt natively for agents. The infrastructure layer is moving from cloud to body.