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

The number Sanders is proposing — a whopping 50% — got some renewed attention this week after the Financial Times reported 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 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, from Norway's ~$2 trillion behemoth 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. 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.

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, 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.

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. 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.