Bernie Sanders Wants the Government to Own Half of Every Large AI Company. He’d Take It in Stock.
On June 1, 2026, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) announced, in a New York Times op-ed, that he will introduce the American A.I. Sovereign Wealth Fund Act — a bill to hand the federal government a 50 percent ownership stake in the largest U.S. artificial-intelligence companies, naming OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI.
The mechanism is a one-time 50 percent tax — not on profits, but paid in equity. The firms would remit half their stock to a government-held fund, which Sanders says would cut the public “direct payments” and underwrite health care, education, and housing. The government would also take voting shares and equal board representation, giving it the power to “block decisions that hurt our citizens.”
By the firms’ most recent private valuations, that is a federal claim on roughly a trillion dollars of equity in three companies. Below: what Sanders actually proposed, in his own words, and the economic and constitutional case against it. We quote him accurately, then document the critique.
- 50%one-time tax on the stock of large AI firms — paid in equity, not cash — Sanders NYT op-ed · Free Beacon · June 1, 2026
- 3firms named — OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI — plus “other AI behemoths” — Common Dreams · June 1, 2026
- $1,033,500,000,000in equity a 50% stake would put under federal control across the three firms — CNBC · Axios · Fortune · Reuters valuations
- 50%of each board — equal government representation, with voting shares to block decisions — Washington Examiner · Sanders op-ed
- ~20%of a decade’s normal job turnover that Sanders’s AI job-loss figure represents — AEI · Will Rinehart · Oct. 9, 2025
A 50 percent tax, paid in stock, into a fund the government controls. In his own words, not a paraphrase.
The proposal, as Sanders laid it out in a June 1, 2026 New York Times op-ed and a same-day statement, has four moving parts. First, a one-time 50 percent taxon the largest AI companies, levied not on their cash profits but on their stock — the firms would “remit equity shares to the public.” Second, those shares go into a new American A.I. Sovereign Wealth Fund. Third, the fund’s returns would fund “direct payments to the American people” and help guarantee “health care, education and housing.” Fourth — and least noticed — the government would hold voting shares and equal board representation at each company.
Sanders frames it as recapture, not seizure. AI, he argues, is “built on a public resource far more valuable than oil: the accumulated knowledge, creativity, and labor of mankind” — so “when a public resource generates wealth, the public should share in that wealth.” He names OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI explicitly, and folds in “other AI behemoths.” Two stated rationales drive it: compensation for “stolen data” used to train the models, and a cushion for the workforce displacement he says is coming — “millions of truck drivers, bus drivers, taxi drivers and rideshare drivers” within a decade.
“The wealth it generates must benefit humanity — not just Elon Musk, Sam Altman and other AI oligarchs.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) · New York Times op-ed · June 1, 2026
Sanders is careful to note he did not invent the idea. He credits two law professors — Jeremy Bearer-Friend of George Washington University and Sarah Polcz of UC Davis — whose December 2025 Columbia Journal of Tax Law article proposed taxing companies in stock rather than cash. He also points out, accurately, that OpenAI and Anthropic have each floated their own versions of a public AI wealth fund. The novelty here is the scale, the mandate, and who ends up holding the shares: the federal government.
AI is built on humanity's collective knowledge. The wealth it generates must benefit humanity — not just Elon Musk, Sam Altman and other AI oligarchs. That's why I'll be introducing the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act — to give the public a direct ownership stake. (Paraphrased from the senator's post announcing the bill.)
Half of three companies is roughly a trillion dollars. That is the size of the federal claim.
To understand the scale, start with the firms’ own most recent funding rounds. In late May 2026, Anthropic closed a $65 billion round at a $965,000,000,000 valuation, briefly the most valuable AI startup in the world. OpenAI’s record round earlier in 2026 valued it at about $852,000,000,000. xAI, before its planned combination with SpaceX, carried a private valuation in the $250,000,000,000 range. These are private-round marks, not public-market prices — but they are the firms’ own numbers.
A 50 percent stake across just those three would put on the order of $1,033,500,000,000 of equity under federal control — and Sanders’s bill reaches further, to “other AI behemoths.” The mechanics matter as much as the dollar figure: because the firms are private, there is no liquid market to value the shares against, no public float to absorb a government seller, and no precedent in modern American history for the U.S. taking a controlling-adjacent equity position in a leading technology sector by statute.
- →A one-time 50% tax on the stock of large AI firms — remitted as equity, not cash.
- →Shares deposited in a new American A.I. Sovereign Wealth Fund, federally held.
- →Government takes voting shares and equal (50%) board representation at each firm.
- →Fund returns underwrite "direct payments" plus health care, education, and housing.
The case rests on a job-apocalypse forecast. The data on that forecast is thinner than the rhetoric.
The displacement argument is the load-bearing wall of Sanders’s pitch: if AI is about to erase millions of jobs, the public deserves a stake in the machines that replace them. He has paired the sovereign-wealth-fund idea with a broader package — a robot tax, a 32-hour workweek, worker-elected board seats, and stock profit-sharing — built on the premise of mass automation.
That premise is contested by economists who otherwise take AI seriously. In an October 2025 analysis, the American Enterprise Institute’s Will Rinehart noted that the U.S. economy already churns through roughly 480 to 720 million job separationsover any given decade through normal turnover — meaning Sanders’s headline AI job-loss figure sits “at or below 20 percent of total job turnover.” Rinehart also flagged how unstable such forecasts are: a small change in methodology, he showed, swung one estimate of AI-exposed jobs from 47 percent to 9 percent.
There is also countervailing evidence Sanders’s framing omits. Multiple studies cited by Rinehart find AI acting as a “skill equalizer” — raising the productivity of lower-performing workers in customer support, legal work, and software development more than it raises the top, which compresses rather than widens inequality. None of this proves displacement won’t happen. It does mean the predicate for a trillion-dollar equity seizure is a forecast, not a fact — and the bill’s remedy is permanent while the forecast is uncertain.
Calling it a “tax” doesn’t make the Fifth Amendment go away. A 50 percent equity grab is a nationalization in tax clothing.
The structural objection is that a one-time 50 percent stock levy is, functionally, the government taking half of a private company. Labeling it a tax is doing a lot of work: critics note that mandating equity transfers raises live questions under the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause, federal securities law, and corporate-governance law — and that legal challenges on all three fronts would be near-certain if the bill ever became law. A tax is paid out of value; this proposal is the value.
The economic objections compound it. The Free Beacon’s Ira Stoll pressed the logic of displacement-based confiscation directly: if displacing workers justifies seizing half a company, why not seize half of the makers of word-processing software, electric vehicles, or spreadsheets — each of which erased entire categories of jobs? AEI’s Rinehart adds that AI investment is already taxed through capital gains, corporate income, and property taxes, making a bespoke equity levy redundant as well as distortionary. The deeper worry is the signal: a precedent that the federal government can take half of any industry it deems too transformative would reprice risk across the entire venture economy.
- →Takings: a mandated 50% equity transfer raises Fifth Amendment, securities-law, and corporate-governance challenges (legal analysts).
- →Selective logic: word processors, EVs, and spreadsheets displaced workers too — none were seized (Free Beacon).
- →Redundancy: AI investment already faces capital-gains, corporate-income, and property taxes (AEI / Rinehart).
- →Forecast risk: the job-loss premise swings from 47% to 9% on small methodology changes (AEI / Rinehart).
- →Precedent: a statutory federal stake in a leading tech sector would reprice risk across venture markets.
Sanders proposes to seize half-ownership of large AI firms — a one-time 50% tax paid in stock, not cash. If displacing workers justifies taking half a company, why not seize half the makers of word processors, EVs, and spreadsheets? (Paraphrased from the Free Beacon report.)
Bernie Sanders just admitted the quiet part out loud: take half of every successful company and call it a 'tax.' That's not a wealth fund, it's nationalization — and the next 'too important' industry to get seized is whichever one Washington decides it wants.
Paraphrased commentary · not a verbatim post
Paraphrased; representative of conservative Truth Social reactions to the proposal. Not a verbatim quotation.
A bill to grow federal power by a trillion dollars is a federal-power story. Even when it’s dressed as a dividend.
DOGE Watch tracks the size and reach of the federal government. A proposal to give Washington a 50 percent voting stake — and half the board seats — at the companies building the most consequential technology of the era is, whatever its merits, an enormous expansion of federal power. It would make the United States government a controlling shareholder, regulator, and customer of the same firms simultaneously, a conflict-of-interest knot with no clean precedent.
Make the government a 50% owner, regulator, AND biggest customer of the same AI companies? That's not a wealth fund — it's Washington putting itself on every board in the most powerful industry on earth. Venture capital flees, the next Anthropic gets built in Dubai, and the 'dividend' never arrives.
Paraphrased commentary · not a verbatim post
Paraphrased; representative of free-market Truth Social reactions to the proposal. Not a verbatim quotation.
The honest accounting is this: Sanders is responding to a real question — who captures the gains from a technology trained on everyone’s data — and he is doing so openly, in his own byline, with named scholarly sources. That is more than most lawmakers offer on AI. But the remedy he chose is the most expansive one available: not regulation, not a cash tax, not an antitrust suit, but federal co-ownership. Readers can weigh the diagnosis and the cure separately. We have given them both, sourced — and we will update this page when the actual bill text drops in the coming weeks.
