The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies(sanders.senate.gov) |
The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies(sanders.senate.gov) |
I know many here would scoff at nationalizing a private company, but AI is a usurpation of human knowledge and quite literally at times. (Every AI company was embroiled in copyright lawsuits and lord knows what Qwen et al are up to.)
In turn, everyone knows labor displacement is coming. My bet is the next recession will end up being brutal for this reason. To me, labor displacement and the social consequences are a potentially *catastrophic* negative externality. Should not there be a tax to offset the "frictional" unemployment? What happens when people lose a high skill job and will no longer be able to afford their mortgage?
Also, why are people always talking about AI as if its an angel or satan? The degree to which we're doomed is an open question, much like a tornado... so why aren't we thinking about taxes on AI like a tornado insurance fund?
And let's please not have any lazy, low-effort replies claiming that AI will somehow magically eliminate all jobs for humans.
> And let's please not have any lazy, low-effort replies claiming that AI will somehow magically eliminate all jobs for humans.
I don't think AI actually capable of doing so, but AI companies need to stop bragging about wanting to do this and making it their goal if you don't want people to keep bringing it up.
This is essentially what a handful of c-suite execs have been telling the world for the past 2-3 years is it not?
Furthermore, AI companies and consulting companies themselves are selling this idea that it will completely reshape employment.
I find it more hand-wavey to say "it's just another technology change" than it is to say "this time it's different".
* Investors are committing to keeping their money over a 10 year period, and you pay them dividends
* At the end of the 10 years you can withdraw it all, or keep your stock but withdraw the dividends, or keep your stock and reinvest the dividends for the next 10 years.
* Companies cannot be on any other type of "stock market"
* Companies need to be identified as producing something of significant value, like SpaceX's rockets would qualify.
* It can be part of anyone's 401k since these companies would be scrutinized.
Ideally a social media only company would NEVER qualify. I think the stock market is too happy to buy and sell, when some of these companies are a long term investment that has slowly paid off in ways most people cannot fathom or comprehend including healthcare discoveries.
FTA: "It would create a sovereign wealth fund through a one-time 50 percent tax — not on the profits of OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI and other companies, but paid with something far more valuable than that: the stock."
What % of Americans would agree to that. 10%?
I agree for those of us in the field, we are a lot more confident. But I dont think my retired parents have any idea what AI is or have ever touched anything more complicated than Alexia.
Tech will also probably come under attack from two directions. It's not only from labor replacement, but also from a decrease in the value of tech. Right now competition in tech is limited by the relatively large barrier to entry to writing even simple programs. As that barrier disappears, the baseline value of tech will likely decline sharply.
I agree that labor displacement (and wage suppression) is in fact the only AI product. IN a just society, automation (more generally than AI) would allow people to work less. But we all know that it just means further wealth concentration and inequality.
And as material conditions worsen, society will increasingly rip itself apart. Populism will lead people to blame various out-groups for their woes because there'll be no opposition to it. It's why in the year of our Lord 2026, we have concentration camps again. Some call that term hyperbolic given the association with the HOlocaust. These people don't know history. Concentration camps were originally deportation camps [1].
I keep bringing up municipal broadband as an example of how people who hate "communism" both like their output and it's always better than national ISPs. And you know who else believes in public ownership? The US Department of Defense [2].
[1]: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/deportatio...
[2]: https://investorplace.com/dailylive/2026/06/the-pentagon-is-...
Government spending is already ~40% of GDP.
And what do we get with this half?
A sovereign wealth fund? That seems like a great tool for a certain corrupt politician to use as a carrot to make CEO's bend to his/her whims.
What benefit does that have for anyone else?
You can't build a sovereign wealth fund if you're transferring all the money out. That's just more government spending, not a wealth fund...
Valid point. I'd propose that if the government owns anything it only gets non-voting shares. And it should never own a controlling share of anything.
> And when he government needs money, they often sell at stupid prices.
I'd apply some kind of indexing algorithm. Leaving it to individual managers is bound to lead to corruption.
When did public ownership mean that the government needed to be the owner? And when did we start to allow companies to float so few shares that public shareholder voting rights became largely meaningless?
Concentrated ownership of the wealthy is not synonymous with “the public.” You are very literally arguing for plutocracy over democracy.
In practice, we’re OK with theft. We just argue over who gets the loot and which segment of the population gets harmed.
I yeeted my Reddit account as soon as I learned it was being used, without my consent, to train AI. I now have regrets, that I didn't delete all my comments there recursively first. However, because everything I posted there (and I posted quite a bit!) is part of the training data, it's interesting to know that every future AI is going to have a little bit of my resistance to authority, and lateral thinking, and just a bit of uppity in it, because of me. ;-)
So, to yank part of the profits from our stolen soul back, via a TAX, seems quite reasonable to this Citizen of the United States. No money going out, just asserting authority, and collecting something on behalf of all of us, is a brilliant strategy for offsetting part of the theft they did first.
Obviously the current stakeholders hate losing control and wealth, but that's not the biggest issue.
Senator Sander's goal is not for some vast public to share the wealth, but for the government to have a veto on what gets done, to limit the collateral damage/exported costs. That's a classical government function.
However, the record of regulatory capture is nearly perfect, so it's likely the reverse would be achieved: the government-sponsored providers being a required intermediary in all knowledge work, with a corresponding incentive to seize those reins.
The probabilistic range of possibilities looks bleak: Now that all regulatory or quasi-governmental agencies of any import (Fed, FDA, EPA, Congress, Courts, CPB) have demonstrated remarkable plasticity to political whim, one would anticipate the worst would come of creating a political franchise out of fighting for control over AI; it would corrupt other aspects of politics.
I assume not enough politicians in this senator's camp were given their early cut so this is retribution/a lesson to the abstract "Big Tech" to show that DC is still the city that rules the world.
If the models were built using the output of all of human effort over time, then society at large should absolutely have a voice in the direction of the companies.
This tech should be made for public benefit, not for purely profit and private interests.
Quite frankly, most companies should be worker co-ops instead, and its long passed time we start moving to that model.
The models just take the same information available to anyone and make it more useful, it's not like oil or mining where it's a consumable that people share, nor is it taking from the youth- in fact it's one of the best ways of utilizing the knowledge of the past.
Honestly, the a lot of the people I hear complaining about having a "voice" about "output of all of human effort over time" are usually not the ones who put the information out on the web/books, as they are usually doing it for the benefit of future humans and not for profit. Seems to be the same as PMs or VCs trying to "capture the value" of other people.
Not really, no. Ownership gets you a share of the profits and profits can be used to reduce income taxes. I think non-voting is wise. It prevents political and partisan meddling.
We will all own half, just not the good half.
I feel like I’m going crazy sometimes. Over the next few years we will see the biggest change to employment our country has ever seen. Our entire financial structure is about to be upended, and not a single politician is talking about it. It’s so weird that all I think about is AI, yet not a single politician seems to notice. (Or maybe they do and that’s why they’re pillaging the country.)
Maybe this is a place to start?
Imo this proposal is even worse than a billionaire wealth tax (which has all sorts of implementation issues).
We live in a world where "creating value" (doing things that others find helpful) and "capturing value" (getting those people to pay you money) are two different things. If I give my mom a hug, I'm creating value, but that's not necessarily something I'm going to charge her for it. Most value created by people won't ever be captured. And that's a good thing imo.
It keeps the world moving, removes friction, and allows for authenticity. There's nothing wrong with wanting to capture value, of course. But the second you do that, you're a business. And "capturing value" has a huge set of tasks and responsibilities you now have to handle.
But there's an intuition that has gradually built up over centuries, alongside the growth of "intellectual property" as a concept. It's best paraphrased as, "I want to be compensated for the value I create, without doing any of the work to capture it. And if someone else finds an ingenious way to capture some of the value that I've created, then they should pay me."
To some degree, I understand and agree with the sentiment.
Nothing is built in a vacuum. No person or company is an island. Everything is built on top of public infrastructure and works created by the country, laid by our forefathers. This is just one of many reasons why I believe in a progressive tax system. To the extent that you're able to capture large amounts of value in America, a lot of that is made possible by the infra you're building on top of, which is owned by the public, and a progressive tax system is a good way to to share that with the public.
(Of course, this has its own problems, bc the government collecting taxes is not enough, it has to spend those funds wisely, for the benefit of all. Which it obviously doesn't do, at the federal level, or at many state and city levels. So I've always found it a bit perplexing for people to clamor for more taxation while caring little about how tax revenues are spent. But that's a discussion for another time.)
But overall, I don't like this intuition, because it's essentially rent-seeking behavior.
Capturing value is hard. Simply creating value is not enough. If you write a song, or you build an app, or you cook a meal, you still have all your work ahead of you to find a customer/consumer, and understand what they find valuable enough to pay for, and ensure your offering matches that, and do the marketing/sales to get it in front of them, and convince them to pay, and scale to more people, and manage your books, and do all of this profitably.
Expecting to be paid for simply creating value but doing none of the work to capture the value to me feels a little bit entitled. Or, at the very least, naive.
What's interesting is that certain industries have more or less entitlement here, depending on the influence of "intellectual property" in that industry.
For example, there's almost no concept of intellectual property in the cooking. If you invent a new recipe, you can't really patent it and tell everybody else that they're not allowed to make it. So, pretty much every chef is okay with the fact that they need to actually capture value by opening a restaurant or going to work for one.
It's similar in the software industry, where rather than patenting all of our software and trying to enforce it, we generally do the opposite and release software in an open-source way. We're quite aware that if we want to profit, we'll need to start our own startup, and we have no qualms with that.
But with writing, music, etc., you see a lot more creators who want to just do the creation part, who don't want to do the business part, but who then want the profits that the business part enables.
I can empathize for sure, I get it. But I think a world with less rent-seeking behavior is better. A world where more people understand what it takes to capture value and are willing to do it (or happy to just not do it) is a better world. A world where more people feel entitled to the profits earned by those who are able to capture value, I think, is worse.
Half is far too much but that is an amazing idea. Especially if it is used to reduce income taxes.
But given that this is Bernie, it's probably a stalking horse for future expropriations from other industries later.
Perhaps the assumption is that these large AI companies need large datacenters to operate and that is how they will be regulated. But what about the datacenters outside the US jurisdiction? And what about local AI?
In the old days, the computers were huge and there was one per city. Now, several decades later, we all have plenty of our own computers. I cannot imagine why the trend would not continue with AI. Over time, it is in my opinion plausible that most of our common needs would be satisfied by local AI running on one's home servers or even phones.
How is that going to be regulated by owning a controlling stake in a few US AI companies?
I do not see into the details of what Mr. Bernie Sanders is suggesting. It seems to me though that his idea of somehow regulating the AI needs further development. Because the currently discussed approaches seem to me like a hot take that has not been thought over very well.
No? Then that’s probably why, don’t you think?
Norway's oil fund is another famous example mentioned in the article.[1]
[0]: https://apfc.org/
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Nor...
Because I hate to break it to you, they could have zero drop in quality by just not incorporating US data...
If we're talking about copyright, why are we somehow entitled to profits derived from stealing Taylor Swift's IP? Why do you get a cut of AI derivatives and not get half of her wealth, too, directly?
Microsoft has trained models entirely on synthetic and public data with SotA results.
I think the 50% number is a stake in the ground, period. A starting point for the discussion.
Why not Walmart? That's a great idea. Many companies, including Walmart, pay their employees so little that they qualify for Medicaid and other social benefits even though they're working full-time.
One of the primary methods of building wealth in this country is through stock ownership. Instead of being a wage slave, only making money based on your labor, with a stock tax on a company, the growth of that company's stock benefits everyone in the country directly, rather than just the moneyed few.
> A sovereign wealth fund? That seems like a great tool for a certain corrupt politician to use as a carrot to make CEO's bend to his/her whims.
That is a risk with an administration like the current one, but if the sovereign fund was ethically managed by an independent department, that wouldn't be an issue. The rest of the world has sovereign wealth funds, and you can find some good examples of how to do it right.
> What benefit does that have for anyone else?
How do you benefit with a 401k owning stock? What works for one should work for the other.
> You can't build a sovereign wealth fund if you're transferring all the money out. That's just more government spending, not a wealth fund.
How does any sovereign wealth fund increase its value? Proper planning, spending only dividends and not principal. Also, the sovereign wealth fund would continue to acquire stock whenever any company issues new stock. The fund would get 50% of those shares.
If one were to make it an active fund, the government has enough insider knowledge to know when to buy, sell, and short stocks. What? Using insider knowledge is unfair, you say? Why shouldn't the government play by the same rules as the rest of the finance industry? It's only us retail investors that have less-than-optimal returns because of insufficient knowledge.
> A sovereign wealth fund? That seems like a great tool for a certain corrupt politician to use as a carrot to make CEO's bend to his/her whims.
Use the sovereign wealth fund to reduce income taxes. Other countries manage to run wealth funds without corruption. If a country can't do it then, I hate to break it to you, it's definitely not the fund's fault.
> Why half of AI and not half of Walmart & Exxon & Apple?
Good question. The answer: a more broad-based wealth tax, in the form of assets which go into a sovereign wealth fund, is probably the only way to make the long-term pension math work out in developed countries. You can only tax labor so much when capital actually has the most growth.
> Let us be clear. Artificial intelligence was not created out of thin air. The data and language used by generative A.I. tools didn’t just pop into Sam Altman’s head or Elon Musk’s imagination. A.I. is built on our collective intelligence: our books, songs, artwork, journalism, computer code, scientific research, videos, conversations, images and ideas spanning generations.
This is basically making that point with AI companies as their true influence is rapidly increasing. The rhetorical strategy here is to hook socialist ideas onto something people are already thinking about, a land-and-expand rhetorical strategy.
Personally I'm against the proposal, but the details are not the point because it's not going happen in this form. It's about changing minds first, then changing policy down the road.
Taking ownership of these companies is a Bernie thing not a Trump thing, but a sovereign wealth fund is used to pay off national debt.
You won't have any "wealth" if you use it.
That's just taxing and spending...
Perhaps you don't agree with him, although I would note that it's pretty rare for Bernie Sanders to agree with billionaires about how important something they've invented is! But if you don't take people seriously when they say they think AI is the most important thing that's happened in our lifetime, you're going to be endlessly confused when they act according to that belief.
We haven't gotten to where we are in the world today by giving the wealthy huge permanent advantages. Look at the explosion in innovation that has happened since public education has become widespread. It used to be only the wealthy that could afford to be educated. Part of what makes capitalism work at all is by not allowing the means to capture value to be monopolized.
Source? Specifics? This doesn't even sound plausible at face value. Even if it is somehow true, higher paying white collar jobs being replaced with service jobs that pay far less and have way worse conditions is not a positive or even a neutral outcome.
> The people getting rich off AI have to spend their money somewhere.
The amount of wealth hoarding already going on says otherwise. Buying yachts and islands does not magically offset millions of jobs being lost.
That's demonstrably false.
If it were remotely true, trickle down economics would have been a gold rush for the entire economy.
I think a lot of HN users still somehow don't understand the "lump of labor" fallacy.
https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/page-one-economics/2...
There are efficiency benefits to the government owning stock vs. using the IRS for collection, that part I like. But I don't trust the US gov to use stock voting rights wisely.
What if it got ownership without voting rights?
Let individuals decide (including in the court of law like in those copyright lawsuits by those few that actually produce valuable content) how theirs is to be used.
I trust Anthropic, heck even Musk, more than I would trust some apparatchik legally empowered to decide for the "people".
As long as they are voting shares, I don't see an increase in the harm. I'd like to see a legislative framework about how that ownership is handled that allows Congress and regulatory agencies to make decisions restricting how these companies will operate, but without any regard to the constitutional rights of the corporate persons or their owners.
I'm sick of the government arguing with monopolies, then taking dives. I want it to be abundantly clear that government has the ability to restrict these AI utility companies freely (such as their ability to feed on their customers), while still limiting the rights that the state has over the personal use of AI by private individuals. Partial state ownership will make that possible. Hell, let half their boards be publicly elected.
Most of us are. That's what taxes are, in fact. We have private property rights, and we have to pay taxes. The hard-core anti-tax people try to make that a contradiction; most of the rest of us don't think of it that way, so their "taxation is theft" rhetoric falls flat.
But I think it's important that we keep it at some. Major erosions of private property rights in order "to tax the rich" make me nervous, because I don't want to lose those rights myself. And taking the rights from them, but I get to keep them, seems likely to not be a stable equilibrium.
Funny how you can use that description for how AI companies used everything for training data.
(Not sure if this is the right approach, but the general idea seems rather important.)
They were called kings. Cutting their heads off was the best thing to happen to society, ever.
Take the long view. Our particular economic and ideological moment is not worth defending.
China and Russia are simple examples of the fallout of "cutting king's heads".
So awesome in China that they went straight back to a lifetime emperor now.
The French Revolution and its fallout (communism, fascism) killed more humans than any other historic movement, triggering 2 world wars, including numerous genocides.
Municipal broadband is just 100% publicly-owned. That's what that means. When you have a national ISP, you might not get a service at all despite the ISP guaranteeing service in exchange for money from the state they've taken. You get a service that starts at $60 but somehow gets to $140 in a few years unless you do the annual cancel dance and if you do cancel you have no other options anyway. And what are you really paying for? Lobbying to make municipal broadband illegal.
And these same people will defend the status quo because of "property rights". Nobody here is Jeff Bezos. Does it seem like things are going well? Is this a legitimate belief in unfettered property rights? Or is it just that you believe you'll be Jeff Bezos one day so you'll benefit from the status quo?
This is the origin of the quote possibly misattributed to Steinbeck that Americans view themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires".
“He who oppresses the poor taunts and insults his Maker, But he who is kind and merciful and gracious to the needy honors Him.” Proverbs 14:31
There are those who believe that a human mind is somehow magic and a special exception to the laws of physics, but I am not one of those people.
On the other hand if it put significant money into most people's hands...it's going to be a lot harder to fight.
The fact is, we have tried exactly what you’re suggesting. We don’t even need to get to the brutal communism of China or the Soviet Union. The “social democracy” of India and Bangladesh (where I’m from) left those countries’ economies in the toilet.
The best case scenario for social democracy was the DDR. My wife lived for a year in former eastern germany—in 2001, when the socialist government was as far back in time as Obama’s first term is to today—and folks recall being reasonably happy under socialism. But western germany was still much more prosperous, and it took huge solidarity payments to help the former east germany catch up.
Pay up. Municipal broadband is objectively better than the other options pretty much everywhere it hasn't been banned.
Municipal broadbands were laying 1 gig fiber service while Spectrum and Comcast were still selling 10mb/s as standard.
Surveys of Chinese citizens show very high levels of satisfaction with their government [2] while Chinese people view the West through the "kill line" [3]. The funny part about that is the NYT blaming the kill line on "state media" [4] when it originated on Chinese social media. But that's how deep the anti-China propaganda goes in the US. The transformation Chinese people have seen in their daily lives in their lifetimes is something undeniable [5], liting ~800M people out of extreme poverty. What has the West done in that time? Does it seem like things are going well?
So all I did was point out how people like municipal broadband and you went straight to the slippery slope fallacy "but that's communism!" without actually knowing what communism actually is it seems.
The idea is pretty simple. The people should have a stake in the value they create. You know who else believes that? The US Department of Defense [6]. Is the Defense Department "Communist" too?
[1]: https://freedomhouse.org/country/china
[2]: https://ash.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/final_pol...
[3]: https://fpif.org/how-the-kill-line-redefined-the-american-dr...
[4]: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/13/business/china-american-p...
[5]: https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/server/api/core/bitstrea...
[6]: https://investorplace.com/dailylive/2026/06/the-pentagon-is-...
The plan Bernie Sanders is proposing is clearly stated in TFA, which is to take 50% of shares as a one-time tax, not as a purchase.
For example, I created a useful organization at my school before I graduated. That was twenty years ago. It still exists, and people are still benefiting from it. But they don't somehow owe me compensation, nor would I go around saying that they're somehow exploiting me or expropriating my labor just because they're benefiting from what I've done in the past.
Your story doesn't really relate. I get what you are saying, but your org wasn't copyrighted under you, nor did you expect any monetary returns on it. They stole copyrighted work without permission.
Putting aside hypothetical networks that don’t exist, we do have lots of municipal services. Why would I expect those hypothetical government operated broadband networks to be better than say the shitty government owned and operated train network? Or the dismal government operated schools?
Article 1, Section 8 has the general taxation clause:
> The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
but Section 9 has the apportionment clause:
> No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or enumeration herein before directed to be taken.
The term "direct tax" isn't fully explained, but it's generally been held that taxes on property (including wealth) would classify as a direct tax. Congress imposed an income tax, but SCOTUS said in Pollock v Farmer's Loan & Trust Co that a tax on rental income is effectively a property tax, and so must be apportioned.
The 16th Amendment was enacted specifically to overrule the Pollock decision, and allowed for income taxes to not have to be apportioned. In many respects, it's probably unnecessary because even without it, it's probably fairly likely that Pollock would have been overruled as just being bonkers reasoning anyways.
I guess it's only ok when the government arbitrarily seizes half my paycheck. If it happens to billionaires it's communism or something.
These AI companies are on American land.
Given the sheer volume of information posted to the Internet in the last 40-50 years, I'd wager that covers 80% or more of the relevant input data.
Old text is relatively scarce in the grand scheme of things.
But I have no real clue, just spitballing.
No they weren't. Copyright at this point covers things for at least half a dozen generations back, and is intentionally made annoying enough that it is difficult to find out what is covered and what isn't. LLM companies didn't bother with any of that (they just pirated like your average online 13 year old), meanwhile archive.org got sued for pulling the music off ancient wax cylinders.
Clean up and dramatically shorten, restrict, or even eliminate copyright, and we can start talking about what's fair game or not. People were afraid to sing "Happy Birthday" in movies for probably 80 years, and the corporations that own all IP made it very clear at the time that they preferred for the status of "Happy Birthday" to remain unclear, and would send you a scary letter if you used it.
> probably going to depend on whether AI is a transformative use.
It's probably going to be entirely political, and decided through corruption. It's obviously a mechanical transformation. If rap DJ's got sued for cramming songs full of 80 extremely manipulated samples that you'd need a forensics expert to trace, and all sampled music had to revert to a form where they'd license a single song and re-release it, LLMs are a violation. DJ's doing an absolutely creative translation, and LLMs are not creative, they are pinball machines.
Do you honestly believe there will be enough constant construction on data centers to replace millions of jobs lost to AI? Even if that was somehow true, there are tons of people that are not capable for one reason or another (age, physical fitness, etc) of doing construction work. Construction work also pays significantly less than many of the jobs being lost as is, so it's not a good replacement in that regard. And what happens when construction gets further streamlined and/or automated and requires fewer people? Or none at all, in the future?
Even your most optimistic hypothetical scenario results in millions of people doing hard manual labor for poverty wages. If anything, this just strengthens the case against AI and AI companies.
Also, much of the data used to train LLMs are not strictly public domain. For example, copyrighted books and source code with attribution-requiring licenses feature heavily in many corpuses. There are still pending lawsuits against the labs here, yet they continue to push forward. It’s no surprise that there is popular demand for redistribution.
Don't fall for the great lie of intellectual "property".