Half the Stock, Handed to the PeopleCopied!
Senator Bernie Sanders has announced that he will soon introduce legislation to give the American public a direct ownership stake in the country's largest artificial intelligence companies. The bill, which he calls the American A.I. Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, would establish a national fund seeded by a one-time 50 percent tax on firms such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI. The distinguishing feature of the plan, laid out in a New York Times guest essay published the first of June, is its method of payment. The tax would not be levied on corporate profits, which large companies are notoriously skilled at minimizing. It would be paid in something Sanders considers far more valuable: the stock itself.
Under the proposal, half of each targeted company's outstanding equity would be transferred into a publicly held fund. The mechanism transforms a tax into a transfer of ownership, converting the federal government from a regulator standing outside these companies into a shareholder sitting inside them. Sanders framed the underlying principle in plain terms, arguing that because artificial intelligence is built on the collective knowledge of humanity, the wealth it generates ought to benefit humanity rather than a small circle of executives and investors.
"This would guarantee that the trillions created by AI are used to improve the lives of all of us — and block oligarch decisions that harm the American people."
— Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)A Bet on Equity Over ProfitsCopied!
The decision to take equity rather than money is the heart of the design, and it reflects a particular reading of where the AI industry stands. Sanders has been openly skeptical that the sector's soaring valuations are sustainable, warning against the idea of the government pouring cash into what he views as a possible bubble. Demanding stock instead sidesteps that risk entirely. If the companies prove as transformative as their founders promise, the public's shares appreciate alongside the founders' own. If the boom deflates, the public has committed no taxpayer dollars to the wager.
The plan would also do more than collect a passive financial interest. According to the essay, the federal government would receive voting shares and equal representation on each company's board, using that authority to block decisions that harm citizens and to push for policies that help them. That governance dimension separates the proposal sharply from an ordinary investment. It is not merely a claim on future returns but a claim on future control, placing public representatives in the rooms where the most consequential decisions about the technology are made.
The idea of a sovereign wealth fund is not new, and Sanders pointed to two established examples. Norway built one of the world's largest investment funds on its oil revenues, holding stakes in companies across the globe on behalf of its citizens. Alaska's Permanent Fund, financed by the state's oil wealth, sends an annual dividend check to every resident. Sanders has suggested the AI fund's proceeds could likewise support direct payments to Americans alongside investments in health care, education, and housing.
Notably, the concept has been floated from inside the industry as well. OpenAI published a policy paper earlier this year calling for a public wealth fund that would give Americans an automatic stake in AI companies, and Anthropic has also raised the idea of national sovereign wealth funds holding AI equity. Sanders's version differs in scale and in force: where the industry's proposals leaned on profit taxes and voluntary participation, his would mandate the transfer of half of each company's equity to federal control.
Arriving as the IPO Window OpensCopied!
The announcement lands at a delicate moment for the companies named. Anthropic disclosed on the first of June that it had confidentially submitted a draft registration with the Securities and Exchange Commission for a proposed initial public offering, days after announcing it had raised sixty-five billion dollars at a post-money valuation approaching one trillion. OpenAI continues its complicated transition from a nonprofit to a for-profit structure. For firms actively raising capital and negotiating valuations, the introduction of a bill proposing to seize half their equity introduces a new variable, even if its near-term legislative odds are slim.
There is also a recent precedent for the federal government holding a direct stake in a major technology company. In August of 2025, the United States took roughly a ten percent position in Intel through an investment of nearly nine billion dollars. Sanders is not the only progressive turning attention to the question. The proposal arrived alongside a separate essay by Senator Elizabeth Warren on the case for taxing AI, signaling that the policy conversation in Washington is widening from how to regulate the technology to who should share in the fortune it creates.
Critics Call It ConfiscationCopied!
The reaction from the proposal's opponents was swift and pointed. Critics characterized the plan as confiscation dressed up as fairness, arguing that the government contributed neither the code, the capital, nor the risk that built these companies and therefore has no rightful claim to half their value. Entrepreneur Martin Varsavsky warned that nations which let builders build would prosper while those that seized successful firms would end up importing the same technology at far higher cost. The sentiment was echoed across business and conservative commentary, where the measure was repeatedly framed as a punitive tax on success and a deterrent to the very innovation it seeks to share.
That skepticism extends to ordinary readers as well. In the community discussion of the announcement, one commenter dismissed the measure as nothing but an innovation-killing tax, a compact version of the broader worry that taxing the most dynamic part of the economy will simply slow it down. Even some observers sympathetic to Sanders's diagnosis note a practical hurdle: with Democrats in the minority in both chambers of Congress, the bill has little chance of becoming law in the current session, making it for now a marker of where the debate is heading rather than an imminent change to the tax code.
Who Will Own the Future AI BuildsCopied!
Beneath the mechanics of stock transfers and board seats lies the question Sanders insists the country must answer now, before the technology matures. Artificial intelligence will change the world, he argues; the only open issue is who will own and control that future, who will benefit from it, and who will be hurt by it. His bill is an attempt to settle that question in favor of the broad public rather than a handful of billionaires, and to do so by writing the public's stake into the ownership structure of the industry while those structures are still being formed.
Whether the proposal advances or stalls, it reframes the AI policy debate in a way that is unlikely to fade. The conversation has largely concerned safety, regulation, and the pace of development. Sanders has added a different axis entirely: distribution. As the largest AI companies approach public markets and valuations that rival the largest enterprises on earth, the argument over who is entitled to that wealth — the founders and investors who funded the work, or the public whose collective knowledge the models were trained on — is one Washington appears increasingly willing to have out in the open.