The Next Great Knowledge Hijacking
How Big Tech Is Quietly Seizing the Future of Universities
This new Alogopoly post—historically grounded, and politically current—focuses on the emerging pattern of Big Tech appropriating university research. It frames the Global University-Big Tech Compute nexus, including the recently announced Oxford–Oracle partnership as the next frontier in the enclosure of public knowledge, tying it directly to the development of large language models, “Agentic AI” automation, and the re-packaging of neurosymbolic AI, which are ultimately leading to the capture of scientific agendas.
The Enclosure of Thought, After the Enclosure of Compute
A new global architecture is emerging in which Big Tech and universities are no longer separate spheres but tightly interdependent actors in the AI economy. Across the U.S., elite institutions such as Harvard, MIT, and Stanford now rely on Google, Microsoft, IBM, and NVIDIA for cloud credits, GPU access, and AI/HPC tools—filling the widening federal funding gap. These partnerships extend into national training programmes involving 100+ universities, jointly managed research labs, and compute-powered pipelines that shape both IP and talent flows. In Europe, institutions like Oxford, Cambridge, and UCL face similar dependencies, supplemented by private-sector foundations, GPU donations, and contested collaborations with Huawei. In Asia, universities in China and Singapore integrate with Alibaba, Sea Group, and Western cloud ecosystems to build domestic frontier-AI capacity. Together, these relationships form an infrastructural web where academic research increasingly runs on corporate platforms, defining who controls AI knowledge, compute access, and strategic advantage.
There is a clear pattern emerging—shown in the network diagram— a quiet, under-reported, and potentially devastating for the future of scientific inquiry. The ongoing hijacking of generative and neurosymbolic AI by hyperscalers is only the beginning. The next frontier is something far more structural: the attempted ownership of the university system itself.
We have already entered an era in which Big Tech no longer merely recruits graduates or sponsors labs. It now aims to appropriate the intellectual property, epistemic authority, and future research trajectories of the world’s leading scientific institutions—institutions founded precisely to serve humanity, not shareholders.
And if the current winds are any indication, the University of Oxford may be the first major battleground.
Dr Angel J. Salazar writes about the political economy of artificial intelligence, platform capitalism, and algorithmic power. “Digital Governance” is a regular column in Alogopoly, exploring how digital infrastructures reshape markets, labour, and governance.
