Sixty-nine percent. That number lands with force. A fresh Verasight survey of 1,378 U.S. adults, conducted in June, finds most Americans now back forcing the largest artificial intelligence companies to hand over half their stock to a public sovereign wealth fund. The The Next Web reported the results on July 12, capturing a striking turn in public sentiment.
Support didn’t emerge in a vacuum. Tech layoffs mounted through the first half of 2026. They represented nearly one-third of all U.S. job cuts. At the same time, the very firms shedding workers poured billions into AI capital spending. The contrast fueled anger. Goldman Sachs economist Joseph Briggs projected that more than 9 percent of the labor force — some 15 million people — could lose jobs over a decade-long AI transition. Resentment built. Polls caught it.
Sen. Bernie Sanders gave the idea legislative shape. On June 1 he published an opinion essay in The New York Times declaring, “A.I. is a public resource. You should own half of it.” He announced plans for the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act. The bill would impose a one-time 50 percent tax paid not in cash but in company stock. That transfer would capitalize a fund estimated by Sanders at roughly $7 trillion. An independent seven-member commission, nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate, would oversee it.
The mechanics matter. Companies hitting $200 million in annual AI-related sales would face the levy. New entrants reaching that mark would too. The commission could vote shares to block decisions deemed harmful to the public and advance policies that deliver broader benefits. Sanders envisions annual dividends around 5 percent, potentially delivering about $1,000 per person each year. The money would flow into education, housing, health care. “The public has got to have a significant seat at the table,” he told the Associated Press in an exclusive report on the legislation published June 17. “To make sure that terrible things do not happen to ordinary people, and that in fact, AI benefits ordinary people, not hurts them.”
His argument rests on origins. AI models train on humanity’s accumulated output — books, songs, artwork, journalism, code, research, videos, conversations, images, ideas. “For the most part, tech oligarchs have fed this knowledge into their A.I. models without permission, without acknowledgment, without compensation,” Sanders wrote. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, has himself noted that models learn from our “collective experience, knowledge” and the “learnings of humanity.” That collective foundation, Sanders insists, justifies collective ownership. “When a public resource generates wealth, the public should share in that wealth.”
The proposal didn’t arise in isolation. OpenAI’s own April policy paper called for a public wealth fund that gives every citizen a stake in AI-driven growth. Anthropic, led by Dario Amodei, suggested national sovereign wealth funds holding positions in AI firms. Even Elon Musk, who runs xAI, once tweeted that universal high income delivered through government checks offered the best response to AI-induced unemployment. President Donald Trump has floated government equity stakes in AI companies and discussed the concept with Altman. Strange bedfellows. Yet the common thread persists: ordinary citizens should capture some upside from technology built on shared data and taxpayer-funded research.
Altman met with Sanders for nearly an hour earlier in June at the CEO’s request. He agreed the public deserved equity but drew the line at 50 percent. A smaller stake or profit-sharing arrangement might win his support. Sanders dismissed such overtures as insufficient. “I think people like Sam Altman and Trump may be sympathetic to this are saying: ‘Okay, look, we’re making zillions of dollars so we’re going to be nice guys and maybe we’ll buy off the public. We will give 5 percent of our profits back into the government.'” The senator wants ownership, not charity.
Broader polling reinforces unease. Separate surveys show 79 percent of Americans don’t trust companies to deploy AI responsibly. Seventy-three percent believe AI firms should face liability for harms their technology causes. Sixty-seven percent favor restricting model power. Only 15 percent trust the industry to self-regulate effectively. The Artificial Intelligence Policy Institute highlighted these findings in recent analysis. Gallup data from 2025 revealed strong preference for government or collaborative rules over pure corporate autonomy. Anxiety runs deep.
Critics push back hard. They call the stock transfer an outright seizure of private property. Such a move, they warn, would scare off investors and push talent and capital overseas. Why build the next breakthrough in America if half the company gets nationalized upon success? Others question the jobs premise itself. Altman has publicly stated he does not expect an AI jobs apocalypse. If displacement stays modest, the entire justification for massive redistribution weakens. Survey wording also draws scrutiny. Asking whether companies should be “forced” to surrender equity yields different results than balanced questions about trade-offs. Abstract support for redistribution often evaporates under concrete details.
Yet the Overton window has shifted. What registered as fringe months ago now commands majority backing in at least one well-regarded poll. Sanders’ bill won’t pass the current Congress. That much seems clear. Still, the conversation has moved. No longer do debates center solely on whether AI destroys jobs. They now grapple with who captures the gains and how society redistributes them. Other nations experiment with sharper tools. Chinese courts have ruled that substituting AI for a human worker does not legally justify dismissal. No comparable protection exists in the U.S. or European Union.
Industry leaders race toward public markets anyway. OpenAI, Anthropic and others eye IPOs that could value them in the hundreds of billions. Big Tech incumbents — Nvidia, Microsoft, Google, Meta — spend lavishly on data centers and chips. Goldman Sachs projects $7.6 trillion in cumulative tech spending on AI infrastructure through 2031. Returns remain unproven at scale. Recent market sell-offs in technology shares reflect investor doubts. Will consumers and businesses pay enough to justify the outlays? The question hangs.
Sanders frames his plan as reclamation. The creative work of millions, he says, was essentially stolen by the world’s wealthiest. Time to take it back. Verasight CEO Benjamin Leff offered a succinct explanation for the poll numbers. “The public sees such funds as a way to route the gains of the AI industry back to society.” That framing resonates. It transforms a complex technical debate into a straightforward matter of fairness.
Implementation would prove anything but simple. Valuing private AI firms for a 50 percent stock tax invites disputes. Managing a $7 trillion fund without political interference demands genuine independence. The commission’s voting power could distort corporate strategy in unpredictable ways. Dividends might ease immediate pain yet fail to address structural shifts in labor markets. And if AI genuinely boosts productivity without massive net job loss, the policy could saddle the economy with inefficiencies.
Supporters counter that history offers precedents. Norway’s sovereign wealth fund grew from oil revenues into a massive stabilizer for its citizens. Alaska distributes annual dividends from its fund. Those models differ from forced equity grabs in emerging technology, yet they demonstrate public ownership of resource windfalls can work. AI, proponents argue, represents the ultimate public resource — built on data, infrastructure and knowledge that no single company created alone.
The Sanders proposal, the Verasight numbers, the industry responses and the economic backdrop together paint a moment of genuine tension. Americans appear ready to claim a larger piece of the AI future. Whether through ownership stakes, aggressive taxation, regulation or new social contracts remains unsettled. One fact stands clear. The era of unchecked private capture of AI gains faces growing resistance. Policymakers, executives and voters will spend years wrestling with the terms.
Recent reporting underscores the momentum. Discussions between senior U.S. officials and AI companies about potential government equity stakes have surfaced, according to multiple outlets in early June. The idea crosses party lines even as details divide them. Public pressure builds as more workers feel the direct effects of automation. The question evolves from if the public deserves a share to how much and through what mechanism. That evolution itself marks a profound change in the national conversation about technology and power.
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