AI researcher launches Mechanize to replace human workers

Every now and then, a Silicon Valley startup launches with a mission so extreme that you have to double-check if it's satire.

Mechanize is not satire. Founded by Tamay Besiroglu, the prominent researcher behind the non-profit AI institute Epoch, the new venture has one explicit goal: the full automation of all work and the entire economy.

In plain English, Mechanize wants to build the data, evaluations, and digital environments needed to replace human employees with AI agents.

Eyeing a $60 trillion prize

Besiroglu isn't shy about the math. To calculate the startup's total addressable market, he simply added up every wage paid on Earth.

Workers in the United States earn around $18 trillion annually. Globally, that figure tops $60 trillion. That payroll pool, according to Besiroglu, is the prize.

While manual labor requires physical robotics, Besiroglu clarified to TechCrunch that Mechanize is directly focused on white-collar desks for now. The pitch has already convinced an elite roster of tech backers, including Jeff Dean, Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, Patrick Collison, Dwarkesh Patel, and Marcus Abramovitch.

Abramovitch, a managing partner at crypto hedge fund AltX, confirmed his backing, calling the team exceptional thinkers who understand AI deeper than anyone he knows.

Backlash, conflict of interest, and utopian promises

The announcement triggered immediate outrage. Anthony Aguirre, vice-chair at the Future of Life Institute, remarked that while automating labor is a giant corporate prize, it will be a catastrophic loss for most humans.

The venture also creates an uncomfortable situation for Epoch. The research institute built its sterling reputation by acting as an impartial watchdog, benchmarking frontier models from big tech labs.

That neutrality was already dented last December when Epoch helped OpenAI develop a benchmark used to launch its o3 model. An Epoch director reacted to Mechanize on X with dry sarcasm: "Yay just what I wanted for my bday: a comms crisis."

Besiroglu defended his vision by citing classic effective altruist arguments. Automating all labor, he argues, will generate explosive economic growth. When asked how humans without jobs will afford to buy goods, he suggested people could survive on investments, capital gains, or government welfare.

Why it matters

We think Mechanize is important because it finally drops the polite marketing mask that Big Tech has worn for two years.

Companies like Microsoft and Google insist AI is just a "copilot" designed to help you finish chores faster. Mechanize admits the quiet part out loud: the real money is in turning employee payroll into software licensing revenue.

For knowledge workers, this is a clear signal of where frontier capital is aiming. Physical trades are relatively safe behind the wall of unsolved robotics, but desk jobs that live entirely inside browser windows and code repositories are in the crosshairs.

Still, Besiroglu's financial model skips over a glaring technical hurdle. As he himself admitted, today's AI agents remain unreliable, struggle to retain context across days, and go completely off the rails on complex, multi-step tasks.

Pitching the total replacement of the global workforce when current agents cannot reliably fill out a spreadsheet feels more like Silicon Valley hubris than an imminent reality. Until models can execute basic logic without constant human oversight, humanity's jobs are safer than Mechanize's pitch deck suggests.