Mechanize: A Controversial AI Startup Aiming to Fully Automate All Work and the Global Economy

Mechanize is a newly launched artificial‑intelligence startup founded by Tamay Besiroglu, a co‑founder and deputy director of Epoch AI. The company’s bold mission is to achieve "full automation of all work" and "full automation of the economy," focusing initially on white‑collar jobs.

Besiroglu estimates the potential market size at roughly $60 trillion annually, based on the total global payroll (about $18 trillion in the United States multiplied by three). This massive figure underpins the startup’s ambition to replace human labor with AI agents.

The venture has already begun hiring full‑stack engineers and has attracted high‑profile investors, including AI luminaries such as Jeff Dean. Despite the funding, the company emphasizes that its current focus is on knowledge‑based work rather than physical, robot‑intensive tasks.

Mechanize plans to build virtual work environments and benchmark suites that simulate real‑world tasks—computer use, long‑term projects without clear success criteria, collaboration, and dynamic priority shifting. These environments will generate data for training reinforcement‑learning agents capable of mastering practical job skills.

However, the startup acknowledges that existing AI models lack the reliability, long‑context handling, autonomy, and multimodal capabilities required for such large‑scale automation. Consequently, Mechanize intends to create its own data pipelines and evaluation frameworks to bridge these gaps.

The initiative has sparked intense debate. Psychologist Geoffrey Miller labeled Mechanize "the betrayer of humanity" and an enemy to all, while others warn that an "automation economy" could exacerbate inequality and lead to widespread job loss. Critics also point to the technical immaturity of current AI agents, noting that even after a year of development their performance remains far from satisfactory.

Despite the controversy, Besiroglu argues that fully automated labor could generate unprecedented wealth, higher living standards, and new products and services, with income potentially coming from sources beyond wages, such as rents, dividends, and government benefits. The company asserts that it will move quickly to turn this vision into reality, making the technical challenges it faces worth close attention.