Bernie Sanders wants everyday Americans to enjoy a slice of the AI pie. On June 18, the independent senator from Vermont introduced legislation that would force the largest U.S. artificial intelligence companies to hand over half their stock to the federal government, creating a public investment fund that his office estimates could eventually mail every American a check for more than $1,000 a year.
Sanders’ bill (1), called the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, targets companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Elon Musk’s xAI.
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The number Sanders is proposing — a whopping 50% — got some renewed attention this week after the Financial Times reported (2) that OpenAI has floated giving the Trump administration a 5% stake in the company — and that Sanders, in recent conversations with OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, has pushed for public ownership roughly 10 times larger.
How a 50% “tax” would work
Sanders’ bill would impose what he calls a one-time 50% tax on the country’s biggest AI firms — but the bill specifically asks for shares rather than cash, so any company banking $200+ million in annual AI-related revenue would have to transfer half its equity into a new federal trust, according to the bill summary (3) posted by Sanders’ office. That threshold is low enough to include the biggies like OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI, but also the swollen AI arms of Amazon, Google and Microsoft.
A sovereign wealth fund, in case you were wondering, is a state-owned investment pool. Governments use them to convert a national asset, usually oil or gas revenue, into a diversified portfolio that pays out over time. There are more than 100 of them worldwide (4), from Norway’s ~$2 trillion behemoth (5) to smaller state-level funds in Texas and New Mexico. Sanders’ twist is treating AI itself like a national resource, since he argues the models were trained on humanity’s collective output — our books, our art, our code, our conversations — so the public deserves to own a piece of what that data built.
The fund would be run by a new seven-member panel, the Independent Commission for Democratic AI, nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Crucially, the government would collect dividends but also hold voting shares and take equal board representation at each company, giving it the power to block corporate decisions it deems harmful to the public.
At current valuations, Sanders’ office pegs the fund’s worth at about $7 trillion (6). The plan is to distribute 5% of that value annually — which, spread across the U.S. population, works out to about $1,000 per person.
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What it could actually mean for your bank account
To be clear, this isn’t an entirely new idea — Alaska has been doing this for decades. Back in 1976, Alaska created its Permanent Fund to bank a share of the state’s oil wealth, and it’s paid residents an annual dividend since 1982. This year’s payout was, actually, exactly $1,000 per person (7), sent to more than 600,000 Alaskans starting in October.
The amount swings year to year — it topped $3,200 in 2022 and was closer to $1,700 in 2024 — because state lawmakers now set it by hand rather than by leaning on the old formula. Sanders says Alaska is living proof that the model works: economists have called it one of the only real-world examples of a basic income, and studies have linked it to the lowest income inequality of any U.S. state (8).
There’s a large catch, though (of course there’s a catch): The dividend Sanders envisions would come from shareholder dividends paid by the AI companies — and most of those companies don’t pay dividends, because most of them don’t (yet) turn a profit. OpenAI has operated at a loss since its founding, Fortune points out (6). The bill also disallows the fund from selling any of its shares to raise cash, so any checks depend on AI companies first becoming reliably profitable, and then choosing to pay out. Until that happens, the fund would hold a mountain of stock but distribute nothing.
“Some people have some doubts about the potential financial successes of these companies,” Sanders told reporters (9).
Then there’s the question of whether any of this is legal. The Wall Street Journal editorial board (10) and constitutional scholars including George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin (11) argue the plan would run headlong into the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause, which bars the government from seizing private property without paying fair compensation. As Somin put it, calling a forced 50% stock transfer a “tax” doesn’t change what it is: “If the government seizes half your house or half of your business, that’s still a taking.”
Then, of course, there’s the politics of it all. Sanders concedes he has no co-sponsors for the bill and hasn’t discussed it with the White House, and that it stands almost no chance of passing a Republican-controlled Congress. Yet the underlying idea has traveled surprisingly far across the aisle. President Trump has already taken direct equity stakes in companies including Intel (12), and the Trump administration is in its own talks with OpenAI about that 5% figure.
For everyday Americans, the honest answer for now is that no check is coming anytime soon. But the debate is still worthwhile, and may lead to something at some point — even if it isn’t a $1,000 check in your mailbox.
As Sanders put it (on TikTok of all places (13)): “When a public resource generates wealth, the public should share in that wealth. The future of AI and the fate of humanity must not be decided behind closed doors in Silicon Valley by billionaires seeking to maximize their power and profit. It must be decided by workers, parents, teachers, artists, scientists, communities and the American people.”
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U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (1), (3); Financial Times (2); Common Dreams (4); Reuters (5); Fortune (6); Alaska Department of Revenue (7); Wikipedia (8); Roll Call (9); The Wall Street Journal (10); George Mason University (11); Intel (12); TikTok (13)
This article originally appeared on Moneywise.com under the title: Bernie Sanders wants the government to own half of every U.S. AI company — here’s what that could mean for your wallet
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