Bernie Sanders wants a 50% cut of Big AI

Bernie Sanders wants half of big AI.

Senator Bernie Sanders published an op-ed outlining the upcoming American A.I. Sovereign Wealth Fund Act. His proposal takes direct aim at Silicon Valley's crown jewels: a one-time 50 percent tax on the largest AI firms like OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI. And here is the kicker: the tax would not be paid in cash or corporate profits, but directly in company stock.

Taxing the equity, not the profits

Sanders makes a straightforward argument. Generative AI tools did not just appear out of thin air, nor are they purely the inventions of Sam Altman or Elon Musk. They were trained on humanity's collective library: books, music, journalism, open-source code, scientific papers, and everyday conversations.

Because tech moguls absorbed generations of human work without consent, credit, or compensation, Sanders argues that the resulting wealth cannot belong exclusively to a handful of billionaires and venture capitalists. Handing over 50 percent of their shares into a national sovereign wealth fund would give the public direct equity in the windfall.

Even more consequential is governance. Under the proposed legislation, the federal government would hold voting shares and equal representation on the boards of these leading AI companies, granting officials direct power to block harmful commercial choices and promote public safety.

Turning Silicon Valley's rhetoric against itself

Sanders was quick to note that tech leaders themselves floated these exact concepts first. OpenAI previously suggested establishing a public wealth fund so non-investors could benefit from AI growth. Anthropic's Dario Amodei has proposed national sovereign wealth funds, and Elon Musk has publicly advocated for universal high income via government checks to blunt AI-driven unemployment.

Governments taking equity from generational resources is hardly unprecedented. Norway's oil-funded sovereign wealth fund currently sits at over $2 trillion, shielding national wealth from being hoarded by a few petroleum executives. Alaska did something similar five decades ago with its permanent oil fund.

If big tech wants to sell AI as the new oil, Sanders is simply asking them to pay the oil drillers' toll.

Why it matters

Let us be realistic: the odds of this bill passing in its current form through the United States Congress are slim to none. Even so, it signals an aggressive new frontier in AI regulation.

For users and creators who feel ripped off by training-data scraping, Sanders skips the tedious copyright courtroom battles and jumps straight to structural restitution. Instead of haggling over micro-royalties per song or article, the proposal treats the entire technology stack as public heritage.

For the AI industry, this is an awkward reckoning. For years, founders like Altman and Musk painted grandiose utopian visions of post-scarcity wealth to soften public scrutiny. Sanders smartly called their bluff by taking those utopian talking points and turning them into a literal tax bill. While having federal bureaucrats hold half a startup board's voting power sounds like an operational nightmare that would trigger fierce constitutional challenges, the sheer audacity of this proposal will likely force AI giants to negotiate far more generous concessions on worker protections and creator payouts.