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Bernie Sanders wants the American public to own half of the AI industry. Not through buying shares on Robinhood, but through the government taking them.
The Vermont senator announced the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act on June 1, proposing a one-time 50% tax on the equity of major AI companies. The targets include OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI. The mechanism is straightforward: hand over half your shares, and the government puts them into a sovereign wealth fund designed to benefit ordinary Americans.
Not a profit tax. An ownership tax.
Sanders isn’t going after revenue or earnings. He’s going after ownership itself. Even if an AI company hasn’t turned a single dollar of profit, it would still owe half its equity to the fund.
The collected shares would sit inside a sovereign wealth fund, a model borrowed from countries like Norway, where the government invests oil revenue on behalf of citizens.
Sanders laid out his case in a guest essay published by the New York Times, framing the proposal as a response to what he sees as an unprecedented concentration of wealth among a small number of tech billionaires.
Part of a broader AI offensive
This isn’t Sanders’ first move against the AI industry in 2026. It’s actually his third.
In March, Sanders co-introduced an AI data center moratorium alongside Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. That proposal targeted the physical infrastructure of AI development, seeking to pause the construction of new data centers while regulators caught up with the technology’s energy demands and environmental footprint.
Also in March, Sanders teamed up with Rep. Ro Khanna to propose a 5% annual wealth tax on billionaires, projected to raise $4.4 trillion over the next decade.
The senator has also previously floated the concept of a “robot tax” aimed at companies that displace human workers with automation.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
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