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The Criticisms of Bernie’s AI Wealth Fund Idea Don’t Hold Up

By
Matt Bruenig

Bernie Sanders has proposed making artificial intelligence providers hand over 50% of their stock to a US sovereign wealth fund. Criticisms of the idea, ranging from AI skepticism to arguments against public ownership, have not been compelling.

Bernie Sanders speaks at the National Press Club on June 8, 2026, in Washington, DC.

The objections to Bernie Sanders’s proposal for an AI sovereign wealth fund simply don’t hold up to scrutiny. (Win McNamee / Getty Images)

Earlier this month, the New York Times published a piece from Bernie Sanders about his proposal to require AI providers to hand over 50 percent of their stock to a sovereign wealth fund (SWF) administered by the government. In the piece, Sanders gives three main rationales for this policy:

  1. AI models are trained on the entire corpus of human content creation. The AI companies did not produce this content. Everyone else did. This input should be compensated in some way so as to avoid windfall gains for AI companies.

  2. Stock equity, with voting rights, would enable the government to more directly steer decision-making in a prosocial way.

  3. The gains from this ownership would be available to the public in the form of dividends or revenue for the welfare state.

Sanders subsequently released legislation toward this end, which you can read here.

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