# Bernie Sanders’ AI bill would hand the public half of OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI > Source: > Published: 2026-06-19 14:23:41+00:00 Bernie Sanders has turned a talking point into a bill, and it goes further than anything Silicon Valley or the White House has put on the table. On Thursday, the Vermont senator introduced legislation that would hit the largest AI companies with a one-time 50 per cent tax on their stock, paid in shares rather than cash. That would hand the American public a half-stake in firms like OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI, and seed a sovereign wealth fund that Sanders estimates at roughly $7tn. It is the formal, far more aggressive version of an idea [that has been circulating in Washington for weeks](https://thenextweb.com/news/trump-wants-the-american-public-to-own-a-piece-of-openai-nobody-knows-how-that-would-work). ## $1,000 a year, and a seat at the table The fund would be required to pay out a 5 per cent annual dividend, which Sanders says would put more than $1,000 a year in every American’s pocket, with any surplus going to healthcare, education and housing. The tax would apply to any AI firm with more than $200mn in annual AI sales. A seven-person Independent Commission for Democratic AI, nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate, would manage the fund and use its voting shares to block company decisions it judges harmful to the public. ## The argument: AI is stolen public property The bill’s pitch is as much moral as fiscal. AI “derives its economic value from humanity’s collective intelligence”, it reads, listing the books, songs, art, journalism, code and research the models trained on. “A small number of oligarchs have essentially stolen the creative work of hundreds of millions of people.” The logic follows the oil-and-minerals model: if value is extracted from a public resource, the public should share the returns. ## Further than the labs wanted to go The idea has unlikely fans. Donald Trump has mused about a government stake, OpenAI floated a voluntary [“public wealth fund”](https://thenextweb.com/news/openai-robot-taxes-wealth-fund-superintelligence-policy), and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei has mooted a basic income funded by taxes on AI firms. But Sanders’ version is a seizure, not a gift, and he has said so to Sam Altman’s face. In a meeting, he dismissed a voluntary “5 per cent of our profits” offer as buying off the public. The two remained, by accounts from the room, far apart. ## It probably won’t pass. That may not be the point. The odds are long. Congress is Republican-controlled and broadly pro-industry, former AI czar David Sacks has called the plan “straight up confiscation of property”, and a clause forcing companies to split their AI and non-AI businesses would scramble Elon Musk’s merger of xAI into SpaceX. From the other direction, Palantir’s Alex Karp argues 50 per cent is too timid and that [full nationalisation is coming anyway](https://thenextweb.com/news/palantir-karp-ai-nationalization-sanders-50-percent). Sanders does not expect it to pass. He is planting a flag for the midterms, where anxiety about AI and jobs is becoming a campaign issue; roughly 70 per cent of US college students already see the technology as a threat to their prospects. Whether or not the bill moves, it has reframed the debate. Washington is no longer arguing about whether the public should share in AI’s windfall. It is arguing about how much. ## Get the TNW newsletter Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.