Bernie Sanders Wants the Government to Seize Half of America’s Top AI Companies. Young Voters Love It.

On June 1, 2026, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT, who caucuses with Democrats) used a New York Times op-ed to unveil the American A.I. Sovereign Wealth Fund Act — a proposal to have the federal government take a 50 percent ownership stake in the country’s largest artificial-intelligence companies. The mechanism is a one-time 50 percent tax on the stock of firms such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI, paid not in cash but in equity that would be parked in a new public fund.

Sanders argues that because today’s AI models were trained on “the collective knowledge of humanity,” the wealth they throw off should belong to everyone — not, in his words, “a handful of Big Tech oligarchs.” The fund’s returns, he says, would flow back to citizens through direct payments and spending on health care, education, and housing, so that “every man, woman and child in our country has a decent and dignified standard of living.”

Critics call it something blunter: a heist. Writing for RealClearPolitics, former New York Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey warned that confiscating half of a company’s value is “the fastest way to kill an economy” — and that the people falling hardest for the pitch are the young voters who will live longest with the consequences. This is what the proposal actually says, why economists say the math doesn’t work, and why it’s landing with Gen Z anyway.

• 50% — one-time tax, payable in stock, that Sanders would levy on the largest AI firms — handing the public half-ownership of OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and others · Source: Sanders op-ed, June 1, 2026
• 62% — of Americans aged 18–29 hold a favorable view of socialism; 34% say the same of communism · Source: Cato Institute / YouGov 2025 survey
• 0 — Senate co-sponsors on Sanders' related AI Data Center Moratorium Act, and no House companion bill yet introduced for the wealth-fund plan · Source: Washington Free Beacon

Sanders announced the plan in a June 1 op-ed headlined “The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies.” The legislation he says he will introduce, the American A.I. Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, would create a federal fund seeded by a one-time 50 percent tax on the largest AI developers. Crucially, the tax would be paid in stock rather than dollars: the companies would remit equity shares directly to the public fund, which would then hold a standing half-stake.

The fund would not be a passive investor. Under Sanders’s framework, the government would wield its voting shares and take “equal representation on each company’s board” — power he says would let Washington block decisions it deems harmful and steer the technology toward the public interest. Named targets include OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI. The proceeds, Sanders writes, would be returned to the public through direct payments and funding for health care, education, and housing.

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The idea did not originate with Sanders. It traces to a December 30, 2025 article in the Columbia Journal of Tax Law by law professors Jeremy Bearer-Friend of George Washington University and Sarah Polcz of UC Davis, who proposed financing a sovereign wealth fund with an equity tax on AI firms as “compensation for stolen data and workforce displacement.” The authors were candid that the rate itself is not an economic constant but, in their words, “largely a political question.”

Sanders set the political answer at 50 percent — far above the ceilings of real-world sovereign wealth funds. Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global, the model usually invoked, caps its holdings at roughly 10 percent of any single company precisely to avoid controlling them. Sanders’s plan reverses that logic: it seeks a controlling-grade stake and explicit board power, which is what separates “the public owns a slice of AI” from “the government runs AI.”

“Since AI is built on the collective knowledge of humanity, the wealth it generates must benefit humanity.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) · op-ed, June 1, 2026

The label is McCaughey’s, and her core objection is an incentive problem, not a slogan: “Who would invest or invent,” she asks, “if the government could swoop in and take half?” A 50 percent equity tax is, functionally, an announcement to every founder and venture investor that successful American AI companies will be half-confiscated — which is exactly the signal that drives capital and talent to incorporate somewhere else. She compares the move to expropriations under “Lenin, Castro, or another communist dictator” and calls it “the fastest way to kill an economy.”

The libertarian magazine Reason raised a different alarm: governance. A government that owns and votes half of the most powerful AI firms gains a tool, the magazine noted, “commonly used by real oligarchs and authoritarians” — pointing out that Russia is draining its National Wealth Fund to finance a war and that Iran routes its National Development Fund to terror groups. Even setting motives aside, a single fund controlling OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI concentrates more power over speech, search, and information in Washington than the proposal’s populist framing admits.

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The pitch arrives at a moment of unusual receptivity. A 2025 Cato Institute/YouGov survey found that 62 percent of Americans aged 18 to 29 hold a favorable view of socialism, and 34 percent say the same of communism — with favorability rising the younger the respondent. McCaughey points to a separate Heartland Institute/Rasmussen poll in which nearly 60 percent of voters aged 18 to 24 said they want a democratic socialist in the White House in 2028. To a cohort priced out of housing and worried that AI will eat entry-level jobs, “the public should own a piece of it” is an easy yes.

There is a real grievance underneath the polling. Tech layoffs in 2026 have already topped 142,000, with companies including Meta, Atlassian, and Cloudflare explicitly citing AI investment as a reason for cuts. The American Enterprise Institute argues the lesson is not that capitalism is the enemy but that young voters want a fair shot at ownership and growth — a demand a 50 percent seizure satisfies emotionally while, critics say, undermining it in practice by shrinking the thing being divided.

“Who would invest or invent if the government could swoop in and take half?”

Betsy McCaughey · RealClearPolitics · June 7, 2026

For all the attention, the bill has thin legislative backing. As the Washington Free Beacon noted, Sanders’s related Artificial Intelligence Data Center Moratorium Act drew not a single Senate co-sponsor, and no House companion to the wealth-fund plan had been introduced — even though Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) appeared in Sanders’s announcement. The proposal is, for now, a manifesto more than a moving vehicle.

The idea of public stakes in AI is not confined to the left. On June 6, Sanders met privately for an hour with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who said he could support the concept of public equity in AI but not Sanders’s 50 percent threshold. Reporting that week noted that even some in the Trump White House have floated public-ownership and “sovereign wealth” ideas of their own — a sign that the “who owns AI” debate is scrambling the usual lines, even as the specific 50 percent confiscation draws the sharpest fire.

Sanders is not proposing a robot tax or a shorter workweek here — this is a one-time 50 percent equity tax that would convert half of America’s leading AI companies into a government-controlled fund with board seats. The grievance he names is real: AI is displacing workers and concentrating wealth, and young Americans are right to want a stake in the upside. The question critics press is whether the cure is worse than the disease — whether confiscating half of a company’s value to fund a payout protects young workers or simply teaches the next generation of builders to set up shop somewhere the government can’t take half.

That is the case McCaughey makes when she tells young voters not to laugh it off: the people most enthusiastic about the plan are the ones who will spend their careers inside whatever economy it produces. The proposal will be judged in committee, where it currently has no co-sponsors — and in the court of a generation that, the polling suggests, may need to be argued out of it on the merits rather than assumed against.

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