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Democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., is arguing that the federal government should establish a sovereign wealth fund that’s financed by taking possession of half of the stock in AI giants like OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI, among others.
Sanders wrote an op-ed in The New York Times on Sunday that AI companies built and trained their models using the creative work of millions of people to inform generative AI tools, mostly without receiving permission from the creators or compensating them.
He explained that those creative works have “essentially been stolen by some of the wealthiest people in the world. It’s time for us to reclaim it.”
“Since AI is built on the collective knowledge of humanity, the wealth it generates must benefit humanity,” Sanders wrote, rather than benefiting the founders of leading AI companies or “venture capitalists in Silicon Valley or money managers on Wall Street who undoubtedly see AI as the next great wealth-extracting machine.”
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Sanders explained that he’s planning to introduce legislation that will be called the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, which would impose a one-time 50% tax payable with the stock of leading AI companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI and others.
The senator said the bill would give the public “a direct role in determining the future of this technology,” if his legislation were enacted.
“No longer would the future of AI and the transformation of human life that it will bring be dictated by a handful of Big Tech oligarchs,” Sanders wrote. “The federal government would have the power, through its voting shares and an equal representation on each company’s board, to block decisions that hurt our citizens and to push for policies that help them.”
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He added that the bill would also “guarantee that the trillions of dollars potentially generated by AI are used to improve the lives of all of us – not simply to make the richest people in the world even richer.”
“If the big AI companies continue to grow as rapidly as many analysts expect, then the value of the sovereign wealth fund will grow as well – and the benefits to the American people will grow along with it,” the senator wrote.
Sanders said other sovereign wealth funds, like the one operated by Norway’s government derived from oil revenues, give the government a say in how those resources should be used for the nation rather than allowing oil companies to direct those funds.
He also noted Alaska’s oil fund as well as state pension systems holding stock in companies as other examples of the role the government can play.
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Sanders’ proposal for the AI sovereign wealth fund to control 50% of the stock in U.S. AI companies goes well beyond the limit imposed by Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, which prohibits the fund from holding more than 10% of the shares in public companies, aside from real estate firms.
Additionally, state pension funds typically hold relatively small amounts of stock in individual companies as the funds tend to diversify their holdings to help safeguard the pensions’ assets.
Under the senator’s proposal, the “billions, if not trillions, of dollars generated by this fund would provide direct payments to the American people. And as the fund generates more and more wealth, the proceeds would be used to ensure that every man, woman and child in our country has a decent and dignified standard of living, including healthcare, education and housing.”
“I recognize that for the government to have a major stake in a company, particularly one for which AI is only part of its business, is complicated. More details – including the specific spending priorities and the mechanics of implementation – will be included in the legislation I unveil in the coming weeks,” Sanders said.
“But the principle is simple: when a public resource generates wealth, the public should share in that wealth. AI is being built on a public resource far more valuable than oil: the accumulated knowledge, creativity and labor of mankind,” he explained.
