Bernie Sanders wants the government to own half of every U.S. AI company — here's what that could mean for your wallet

Dave Smith

Sat, July 4, 2026 at 4:40 AM PDT 6 min read

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.