Key Points
- Bernie Sanders introduced a bill to create a U.S. sovereign wealth fund for the AI industry.
- It would be financed by a one-time 50% stock tax on AI firms with $200M+ in annual AI sales.
- Sanders estimates a nearly $7 trillion fund paying a 5% dividend — more than $1,000 a year per American.
- A seven-member Independent Commission for Democratic AI would hold voting shares to block harmful decisions.
Bernie Sanders wants the public to own a piece of the AI boom — not regulate it, own it. On June 18 the Vermont independent introduced a bill that would create a U.S. sovereign wealth fund seeded by the AI industry itself, financed through a one-time 50% tax on the stock of the largest AI companies. The framing is the point: where most AI policy debates are about guardrails, Sanders is proposing public equity.
How the fund would work
The 50% stock levy would apply to AI companies that clear $200 million in annual AI sales, which Sanders estimates would build a fund of nearly $7 trillion. A 5% annual dividend off that fund would, by his math, send more than $1,000 a year to every American, with the remainder directed to health care, education and housing. A seven-member Independent Commission for Democratic AI would manage the fund and use its voting shares to block company decisions deemed harmful to the public — a direct claim on governance, not just cash.
The politics
Sanders pitched the bill as a check on what he calls the "Big Tech oligarchs," naming Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. It has no realistic path through a Republican-controlled Senate, and the 50% tax would face immediate constitutional and market challenges. But the proposal lands as AI capital concentrates at a historic rate — AI companies raised $297 billion in a single quarter earlier this year — and it reframes the central question of the AI era from "how do we regulate this" to "who owns the upside." That question outlasts any single bill.
Source: NPR, The New Republic
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