Bernie Sanders Says AI Companies Have “A Gun At Our Heads” and Wants to Answer It by Handing Every American a $1,000 Yearly Check
Bernie Sanders introduced legislation Thursday that would give the government a 50% ownership stake in any AI company with more than $200 million in annual sales. The American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act would funnel an expected 5% dividend back to the public, which he says works out to $1,000 a year for every American.
“We’re not buying it. We’re getting it,” he told Fortune and other reporters, arguing the public built these tools in the first place. “Every tweet that you send out, every email that you send out, every article that you write, that’s part of AI.”
There’s one obvious problem: most of the biggest names, including OpenAI and Anthropic, aren’t profitable yet. Sanders isn’t worried. “The American people are not going to lose any money, because we are going to be owning half of the stock.”
He also met privately with OpenAI’s Sam Altman this month. Altman agreed the public should hold equity in AI companies but wouldn’t back a 50% stake. Sanders left the meeting convinced the two sides want different things: “Their goal is to make as much money as they can, not concerned about the impact it has on the American people.”
Supporters say the underlying logic is sound. AI is trained on public data and human creativity, so treating advanced models as partly a public commons isn’t a fringe idea. Scholars, and at times OpenAI and Anthropic themselves, have floated some version of public equity or shared upside, and Elon Musk has argued for a universal high income to offset AI-driven job loss. A public stake plus governance rights, the argument goes, gives ordinary people a seat at the table on safety and deployment instead of leaving those calls to a handful of billionaires.
There’s also precedent. Sovereign wealth funds exist in 67 countries, including Norway and the UAE, and in U.S. states like Texas and New Mexico, where they’ve mostly funded education from oil and mineral revenue. Sanders’ bill bars using the fund to bail out failing AI companies and sets transparency and ethics rules for the commissioners.
Critics call the 50% mechanism the problem. Handing the government half the equity once a company crosses $200 million in sales is, in their view, an enormous tax on success that would chill founding and investment in U.S. AI and push leadership toward less-regulated competitors like China. Many of the biggest labs aren’t profitable, so a 5% dividend on a $7 trillion paper valuation could force asset sales or turn hype into a fiscal promise the fund can’t keep.
Governance is the other flashpoint. The independent commission would get voting power and board seats with a broad mandate covering worker welfare, safety, environment, and solvency, which critics say blurs the line between investor and regulator and invites political interference. Defining what counts as an “AI business” inside companies that already bake AI into everything is its own legal mess, and constitutional challenges on takings and due process grounds are widely expected.
Even some who like the spirit of the bill think 50% plus control is too much. Altman’s willingness to discuss public equity in a milder form is the tell: the idea of shared upside has traction, but Sanders’ version is the maximalist take, and that’s where the fight will be.
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