Bernie Sanders pushes for 50% public ownership of American AI companies — proposes AI sovereign wealth fund that would hold direct ownership stakes in largest AI firms

U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has announced that he will introduce a bill that would force the largest American AI firms to hand over half of their stock to the public. The senator proposes a 50% tax on the stock of these firms, which, it seems, will be held by the public through a sovereign wealth fund. It would also mean that the government would have a direct ownership stake in these companies, allowing the people to have a say in how these companies would run.

“The foundation of AI is our collective human intelligence. Our books, songs, artwork, journalism, computer code, scientific research, videos, conversations, images, and ideas spanning generations. As Sam Altman himself acknowledged, AI models were trained on our ‘collective experience, knowledge, and learning of humanity’,” said Sanders. He also added, “Since AI is built on the collective knowledge of humanity, the wealth it generated must benefit humanity. Not just Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, and other billionaires, or the venture capitalists and Wall Street firms who see AI as the next great wealth extracting machine.”

According to the senator, the biggest AI companies themselves have started this idea. OpenAI has already proposed a public wealth fund so that the public would benefit from AI-driven economic growth, while Elon Musk himself posted on X that “Universal HIGH INCOME via checks issued by the Federal government is the best way to deal with unemployment caused by AI.”

He then compared his AI sovereign wealth fund proposal to Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global and the Alaska Permanent Fund. Both are sovereign wealth funds whose proceeds came from their nations’ oil wealth — the former is now worth US$2.3 trillion and is used to fund the European country’s extensive public welfare system, while the latter has been paying out $1,000 to $2,000 to every Alaskan citizen annually since 1980.

Sanders’ proposal plans to combine the benefits that both Alaska and Norway deliver, while simultaneously forcing AI companies to hand over 50% of their ownership to the public through the government. This might seem a radical solution, but the senator is no stranger to extremes. He has previously called for a halt to all AI data center construction, saying that such a move “will give democracy a chance to catch up.” While a federal moratorium still hasn’t been approved, more and more jurisdictions across the U.S. are approving data center bans as communities are pushing back against their development in their backyards.

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