On August 10, Mark Zuckerberg published a letter titled "The Future for Everyone" — a manifesto laying out his vision for how superintelligence could improve people's lives, expand human capability, and distribute the benefits of artificial intelligence more broadly. The letter advocated for wider distribution of AI access across countries and companies as "the path to a positive AI future," sharing ways in which Meta is trying to make it happen.
Rest of World spoke to six AI observers from around the world about what they made of the letter. The responses were not kind.
Who Decides What "Everyone" Means?
The fundamental question raised by every respondent: who gets to decide what "everyone" includes? Zuckerberg's vision assumes that access to AI technology — particularly through Meta's platforms — will naturally translate to empowerment. But the experts pushed back hard on this assumption.
Sagar Vishnoi, director and co-founder of Future Shift Labs in India, argued that Zuckerberg's definition of "everyone" largely excludes people at the margins of the digital ecosystem: speakers of low-resource and tribal languages, shared-device households, communities with intermittent connectivity, and populations for whom digital infrastructure remains uneven.
"If companies genuinely want AI to educate billions, investment cannot stop at bigger models," Vishnoi said. "It has to extend to building open language infrastructure — consent-driven data sets, community-led language digitization, and compute access for local researchers and developers."
The African Reality Check
The criticism was sharpest from African voices, who pointed to a long history of unfulfilled promises from Silicon Valley.
Chinasa T. Okolo, founder and scientific director of policy incubator Technecultura and inaugural policy lead of research organization Black in AI, was blunt: Meta has "grossly overstated the economic benefits" of its data centers, not only in this manifesto but through extensive advertising campaigns focusing on smaller rural towns.
The data is stark. Kenya is currently pausing a Microsoft and G42-backed geothermal data center due to grid constraints. Meanwhile, forthcoming efforts like Cassava AI's Nvidia-powered AI factories are likely to exacerbate grid stability concerns in countries like South Africa and Nigeria.
"The labor benefits of data centers are primarily concentrated during construction," Okolo explained. "Once operational, they employ only a small fraction of permanent workers. While there is a marginally increased impact on home prices, this benefit doesn't translate to local wages. Data centers are also associated with negative health and environmental impacts, which are likely to be even more challenging in African countries, which have fewer protections."
Mark Mulobi, products and practices associate at global nonprofit Digital Impact Alliance, echoed these concerns from a Kenyan perspective. He acknowledged the potential for AI to act as a personal tutor — helping people learn, build skills, and access new opportunities — but warned that the promise of "AI for everyone" risks overlooking fundamental realities.
"Not everyone is online, digitally proficient, or able to engage with AI in English," Mulobi said. "Realizing AI's potential in Kenya — and across Africa — requires confronting the last-mile realities that still shape who can participate: reliable electricity, high-speed internet, affordable devices, and meaningful access in rural and underserved communities. It also requires deliberate investment in African languages and local knowledge systems. Without those investments, AI risks widening existing digital divides rather than becoming the empowering, inclusive technology that this vision aspires for it to be."
The Colonial Pattern Repeats
Perhaps the most scathing critique came from Abeba Birhane, founder of Trinity College Dublin's AI Accountability Lab, who drew direct parallels between Meta's current rhetoric and its historical behavior in Africa.
"Decades ago, when Facebook overtook much of the African continent, Zuckerberg's motto was something like, 'connecting the rural and unconnected women across the continent,'" Birhane said. "Now, with a full grip on the continent's digital infrastructure, Facebook/Meta has amassed populations' data, monopolized the digital sphere, and controls the information ecosystem, with no observable benefit to the actual rural women it once boasted it would benefit."
Birhane continued: "Facebook has since exploited cheap or unpaid labour of data workers, extracted our resources, and caused enormous harm through disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation, while the corporation's response when it is called out has been to displace accountability at any cost and gaslight the very people it claimed to help."
Her conclusion was unequivocal: "Nobody should take Meta or Zuckerberg's letter to 'benefit everyone' seriously when the corporation that continues to silence criticism, retaliates against its own workers for exposing its technology's harms, buries evidence of harm to minors, actively launches problematic products... and continually violates its legal obligations somehow claims to have people's — especially vulnerable groups' — best interests at heart. It's laughable."
AI as a Vector of U.S. Power
The geopolitical dimension of Zuckerberg's manifesto didn't escape notice either. Juan Ortiz-Freuler, co-founder of global civil society coalition Non-Aligned Technologies Movement, argued that Meta's vision serves U.S. hegemony rather than global good.
"Meta is so big it runs afoul of many different interest groups," Ortiz-Freuler said. "These contradictions become more acute as the U.S. expects its private multinational tech corporations to play a key role in upholding U.S. hegemony, which often contradicts its profit-driven motives."
He noted that while the first sections of Zuckerberg's letter target the global community — and regulators in places like Brazil, India, Turkey, and Nigeria — with a message of transparency and willingness to cooperate, the latter sections are directed to U.S. regulators and power brokers who expect Meta to be a vector of U.S. power.
"Essentially, Facebook is redistributing tasks to its users across the world while training a central machine to understand the complex web of relations that underlie the world of symbols it was fed as text," Ortiz-Freuler explained. "It will use this to optimize its machines for a variety of tasks (curation, targeting), which it acknowledges it will also put at the service of the US government and the America First agenda."
The Trust Deficit
Priya Vora, CEO of Digital Impact Alliance, identified what she called "many aspects of trust that this letter omits." She argued that technology must be grounded in four guiding principles: participation, agency, choice, and trust.
"The letter speaks to participation, but meaningful participation requires people to have agency and choice — and to trust the systems they are being asked to use," Vora said. "Governments can establish the rules of the road, but companies have to earn people's trust through their actions. That means designing AI hand in hand with users — especially with those for whom accessibility needs are high — being transparent about how data and AI systems are used, and, crucially, giving people meaningful recourse when AI gets something wrong."
The Bigger Picture
Zuckerberg's manifesto arrives at a pivotal moment. Meta is investing billions in AI infrastructure globally, positioning itself as a leader in the race for superintelligence. The company has been expanding its data center footprint in emerging markets, partnering with governments, and promoting AI access as a public good.
But the critique from the Global South is clear: access without infrastructure, without language support, without accountability, and without power-sharing is not empowerment — it's extraction dressed in progressive rhetoric.
As the AI industry races toward superintelligence, the question isn't just whether the technology will benefit everyone. It's who gets to define "everyone," who controls the infrastructure, and who reaps the rewards. Zuckerberg's letter may have been published in Silicon Valley, but its critics are speaking from Lagos, Mumbai, Nairobi, and Dublin — and they're not buying the pitch.
🔥 Hot Takes
1. Zuckerberg is rebranding extraction as empowerment. The manifesto reads like a press release, not a plan. Meta has spent two decades extracting data from the Global South, and now it wants credit for "sharing" AI tools built on that data. This isn't philanthropy — it's brand rehabilitation for a company that has repeatedly failed the very communities it claims to help.
2. The "digital divide" isn't a tech problem — it's a power problem. Experts from Africa and India aren't saying AI won't help; they're saying Meta isn't doing the work. No investment in African languages. No community-led data governance. No meaningful recourse when algorithms fail. You can't build trust with a press release when your track record is disinformation, data extraction, and broken promises.
3. AI for everyone means AI for profitable people. Zuckerberg's vision of "wider distribution" really means wider distribution of Meta's surveillance apparatus. The same company that profits from engagement-optimized content, targeted ads, and data extraction is now selling AI as liberation? The Non-Aligned Technologies Movement has it right: this is U.S. tech hegemony dressed in the language of equality. Don't be fooled.