As is typical of avaricious communists, Bernie Sanders is proposing that the U.S. government seize 50 percent ownership of large artificial intelligence companies. He claims it would be a one-time tax. Since when does any tax go away once levied?
“I will soon be introducing the American A.I. Sovereign Wealth Fund Act. “This legislation would give the public a direct ownership stake in the largest AI companies in our country,” Sanders announced in a New York Times opinion article published online. “It would create a sovereign wealth fund through a one-time 50 percent tax—not on the profits of OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and other companies, but paid with something far more valuable than that: the stocks.
It won’t go anywhere for now. But it will take off when Democrats are back in control.
Elizabeth Warren wants the profits from AI, which she plans to redistribute to fund free healthcare and college. This would kill the incentive and economic growth. She wants to tax data centers and billionaires and grow government. We are already at a disadvantage with China.
Senator Elizabeth Warren has never seen anything she didn’t want to tax. Her calls for an AI tax are her latest attempt at killing economic growth for middle- and lower-class Americans. If she wants to protect workers, she should stop taking so much of their earnings.… pic.twitter.com/hv4n8HJY3b
— Heritage Foundation (@Heritage) June 1, 2026
Sanders said he got the idea from professors, who are feeding these far-left ideas into the system.
He got the idea from two law professors, Jeremy Bearer-Friend of George Washington University Law School and Sarah Polcz of UC Davis School of Law. Bearer-Friend is a former aide to Warren, who herself is a former law professor. He’s also written for the Roosevelt Institute, a think tank funded by the Hewlett Foundation, George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, and the Ford Foundation that published a Bearer-Friend paper proposing a $1 trillion tax to fund racial reparations. (”As with any new trillion-dollar tax, we should expect litigation. But the power to tax has been a part of our Constitution since our founding and is not on its face legally dubious.”), writes Ira Stoll in The Washington Free Beacon.
The government would own half of AI and control a fund that would allegedly go to the public good. We know how that works from the non-existent lock box for Medicare and Social Security.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claims data centers cause environmental damage.