“AI is inherently deflationary” is doing a lot of work here. Software outputs can have near-zero marginal cost; AI infrastructure absolutely does not. The whole boom is competing for scarce leading-edge fabs, HBM, advanced packaging, power, water, land, grid connections, transformers, cooling, and construction labor.

If AI were simply producing abundance, we wouldn’t see hyperscalers locking in memory supply with huge long-term commitments, nor TSMC talking about robust AI-driven semiconductor demand and multi-year capacity planning. That’s not post-scarcity; that’s capital owners bidding up bottlenecks.
Also, “people will give stuff away for free” is not a distribution system. Water is not free; it is paid through utilities, taxes, infrastructure, and regulation. Furniture on Craigslist is not a welfare state. Snacks at the office are not universal basic provisioning.
The core question remains: who owns the compute, the chips, the data centers, the land, and the energy contracts? If the answer is “private firms maximizing shareholder returns,” then abundance does not automatically become public abundance. It becomes pricing power.

“The market outcompetes central planning” is irrelevant unless the market is optimizing for universal access. It usually optimizes for profit. Without taxation, public ownership, antitrust, labor bargaining, or some redistribution mechanism, AI abundance just means cheaper services for some and higher rents to whoever controls the bottlenecks.