Sanders proposes AI wealth fund, Trump backs lighter regulation

The next battle over artificial intelligence is no longer just about how fast machines learn. It is about who gets paid when they do. Bernie Sanders is preparing a bill that would create a federally managed American A.I. Sovereign Wealth Fund, financed by a one-time 50 percent tax in company stock on major AI firms such as OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI.

Sanders says the public should hold a 50 percent ownership stake in major AI companies because the technology rests on the “collective knowledge” of humanity, not on the labor of a small circle of billionaires. He has warned that AI and automation could wipe out nearly 100 million American jobs over the next decade, even as executives and investors collect record gains. In his view, a public fund would turn that concentration of power into a national asset instead of another private windfall.

That idea fits into a broader push by Sanders to tax extreme wealth, not just corporate profits. On March 2, 2026, Sanders and Representative Ro Khanna introduced the Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share Act, which called for a 5 percent annual wealth tax on 938 billionaires holding $8.2 trillion. Together, the two proposals sketch a similar answer to the same problem: if AI is generating outsized gains, the gains should be pulled back into public hands rather than left to compound inside a few firms and among a few investors.

Donald Trump is taking the opposite tack. The White House says his administration favors AI innovation and security, and it has made clear it does not want to stifle the industry with burdensome regulation. A White House AI framework said state legislatures introduced more than 1,000 AI bills, creating a patchwork of rules that Trump wants to preempt with a common federal policy. That approach rewards speed, scale and corporate freedom, while leaving much of the wealth produced by AI where it already sits.

The administration has also explored a more unusual route. Senior U.S. officials held preliminary discussions with major AI companies about the government potentially taking equity stakes, including the possibility that firms voluntarily cede shares to a public fund. Trump also said he expects top AI companies to agree to “giving back” to the public. OpenAI has separately floated a “Public Wealth Fund” concept in policy discussions, a sign that the argument over AI’s profits is shifting from abstract ethics to hard questions of ownership, taxation and who gets the upside when automation remakes the economy.