Bernie Sanders’ call to seize the AI industry has damning lessons about politics today

Sen. Bernie Sanders proposed nationalizing half the AI industry, a plan the New York Post Editorial Board calls unconstitutional, economically destructive, and tyrannical. The editorial argues that such extreme ideas, though unlikely to pass, shift political discourse and could lead to scaled-down versions being adopted by future campaigns.

Bernie Sanders’ call to seize the AI industry has damning lessons about politics today By Post Editorial Board Published June 21, 2026, 4:40 p.m. ET See more of our coverage in your search results. Add The New York Post on Google https://www.google.com/preferences/source?q=nypost.com Sen. Bernie Sanders’ latest communist fever dream — nationalize half the AI industry https://nypost.com/2026/06/06/opinion/dont-laugh-off-bernie-sanders-communist-ai-heist-attempt/ — is telling in a host of ways: Damning about his entire political project and the modern US political world. It has zero chance of passing even a Democratic Congress; it’s blatantly unconstitutional; it’s economic suicide — and it’s fundamentally tyrannical . But his call to seize trillions of dollars of private property doesn’t get him laughed out of the discussion. Indeed, it will likely soon be a regular talking point for the movement he leads. Which means there’s an excellent chance some scaled-down version of it will be grist for multiple 2028 presidential campaigns, and the demand of lefties in Congress — and so prompt serious consideration of various “compromise” proposals. He did the same thing with “Medicare for All,” his push for socialized medicine; others in the party did it with demands for open borders — which became the Biden administration’s de facto policy. Heck, his also-lunatic call for a national moratorium on new data centers is inspiring pushes for state-level ones that could well become law, for example in New York https://nypost.com/2026/06/04/opinion/legislatures-data-center-ban-is-economic-suicide-for-new-york/ , when every single claim about the centers’ evils is utter poppycock https://nypost.com/2026/06/16/opinion/everyone-is-afraid-of-ai-data-centers-have-become-the-ultimate-scapegoat/ . Even his argument for the AI-seizure idea is absurd: He insists that “the foundation of AI is based on the collective knowledge of humanity and the creative work of tens of millions of people.” OK: Several companies have played fast-and-loose with intellectual-property rights in training up their Large Language Models software, but our laws already offer a template for justice there: Just use existing royalty systems that, for example, compensate songwriters when a measure of music they wrote is sampled and streamed on Spotify. Let the writers themselves get paid for their “creative work”; it’s no excuse for the feds to get a dime. But that issue isn’t really the heart of Bernie’s argument; it’s much more the Obama “You didn’t build that ” theme, off the trivial truism that every innovation, every successful business, depends on the functioning society around it and our collective heritage of knowledge. By that logic, the “people” should own everything . . . with the elite who run the government deciding what the people actually get out of it. That collectivism brings oppression and ruin everywhere it’s tried — but then Sanders has been a fan of every nation that’s impoverished itself this way, from the Soviet Union to Castro’s Cuba to Chavez’s Venezuela. A record that didn’t stop him from nearly becoming Democrats’ 2020 presidential nominee. And, really, some smaller-scale version of “seize the wealth” now drives practically every major Democratic proposal — with “clever” Republicans looking for creative ways to join in https://nypost.com/2026/06/12/opinion/why-are-some-republicans-pushing-price-hiking-pro-union-bills-in-congress/ . The bottom line: Bernie Sanders’ ideas are monstrous — a recipe for the destruction of the greatest country the world has ever known — yet next to no one in politics or the media stands up to denounce them, or him. And refusing to call out the evil in your midst never works out well.