After the Civil War the planters lost formal power, kept the land and got the same result "under a different guise". AI rules that move the board but not the compute will go the same way.

The claim

Formal loss of control does not end extraction while the old elite keeps its economic base. In Acemoglu and Robinson's U.S. South, "the Civil War did not destroy the political power of the planter elite or its economic basis, and they were able to restructure the system, under a different guise but still under their own local political control, and to achieve the same objective: abundance of low-cost labor for the plantations." Applied to AI governance, this predicts that changes to formal control of a lab (a charter, a nonprofit board, a licensing regime, an outside evaluator) that leave the compute, the weights and the distribution with the same owners will be restructured around, and the same objective reached under a different guise. Inference beyond the quote is Theseus's.