This paper argues that in the neoliberal economic paradigm, AI technologies are reinforced and are constituted by an economic logic based on profit maximisation. That is, AI as an essential ingredient of global economic power is co-opted into the exploitative structures of neoliberal capitalism. It is a key driver of the emerging platform-based economic order that intensifies an already unequal and unfair international development context. Current analysis therefore misses the point about how relations of power at various levels are being recast in the AI-based global economy.