The AI industry is growing at a fierce pace, but so is skepticism about where it will lead, with some worried about data centers sucking up power and jobs being replaced with computers.
Capitalizing on those fears, socialist wacko Bernie Sanders has proposed the “American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act” — which has grabbed headlines for claiming it will raise $7 billion and distribute thousands of dollars to every American.
It’s a pie-in-the sky scheme, doomed from the start. Not least because it would force all major AI companies to hand 50% of their equity over to the federal government! Savvy Silicon Valley bosses have wasted no time in finding clever ways around it.
Earlier this week, investors and the CEO of Altimeter Capital, Brad Gerstner, floated an alternative. They propose key players in AI voluntarily giving up a much smaller stake in their companies, which the federal government could then distribute to the people.
In an interview on CNBC this week, Gerstner even said he’s already spoken with the top players: xAI’s Elon Musk, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei (although he didn’t reveal what they’d told him about participating).
The proposal is being sold as a capitalist response to a socialist solution, but still sets alarm bells ringing. Sensible people don’t feel the federal government should play a larger role in distributing wealth than they already do, an amount in the trillions each year — something Trump’s second term has been all about reigning in — and that’s before even thinking about how many billions are lost to fraud.
It would also set a terrible precedent, taking the country’s most successful companies —the backbone of the current record-setting stock market — and expecting them to restructure, simply to assuage a little public anger.
“It’s voluntary now but it accepts the premise that big businesses should restructure their operations to appease the masses,” Nathan Leamer, executive director of Build American AI, cautioned me.
Sanders’ premise is, of course, deeply rooted in Marxist theories — he argues in his new bill that because the large datasets which train AI are based on scanning all available human knowledge from scraping the internet and scanning books, that everyone had a hand in building it and should be entitled to a piece.
But the hard work and risk-taking, intricate programming and building out the technology to actually put all that knowledge to use aren’t public property, it’s entirely private enterprise.
Sovereign wealth funds have traditionally been used to manage revenues from natural resources like oil, gas and mined minerals. Treating AI as a public asset effectively hands over all the intellectual property which went into building it over to the state.
The proposal also raises a deeper concern, because it works both ways: what happens when an AI company suddenly requires help from the government?
For companies like OpenAI — burning through hundreds of billions of dollars while generating only a fraction of that in revenue — a deal with the government could actually be a lifeline. It could quickly go from wealth-sharing to the government bailing out, or politically protecting, these companies.
It would also inevitably lead to an even greater coziness between [big business and big government.](https://nypost.com/2025/03/27/opinion/how-trump-caught-big-government-fans-in-their-own-trap/)
Is it wise for Washington to go from a neutral regulator to having a vested interest in a series of companies they oversee, to grow their massive valuations even further? Surely, this would stifle competitors and up-and-coming innovators, stagnating advancement and creating monopolies?
The impulse to give Americans a stake in the future is understandable. And as AI companies are creating tremendous amounts of wealth for a handful of people, there is a great instinct to give back. But they should do so at the private level — investing in job training programs, giving a local dividend to communities impacted by data centers, and improving local infrastructure where the companies operate.
Silicon Valley can easily and more efficiently give back without the federal government’s grubby hands getting in the cookie jar. Nobody from either party could say with a straight face the government is efficient.
Embracing a fusion of state power and corporate dependence, like we see in China, only comes at the expense of the free market, and then, individual freedoms.