It takes a trivial amount of compute to do stuff like book flights or submit forms, but there are other dimensions where the marginal utility of compute doesn't taper off as fast, like legal defense or PR campaigns/mass manipulation.

Imagine two competing political candidates, one has funding from an AI lab and produces thousands of short-form AI videos per day and spends millions of analysis of the full spectrum of feedback and performance of the ads, simulates public sentiment, pruning every aspect of their persona, response strategy, channels to focus on, etc. Or a company accused of misconduct creating an AI psychological profile of the judge and every jury member via their social media history and demographic information and curating the best permutation of arguments from millions of options that maximize every predicable sentimental vector.

> Imagine two competing political candidates

Campaign spending is textbook example of a negative sum game - it can waste unbounded amount of resources and everyone is worse off from it happening.