Sanders bill would tax top AI firms 50% in stock for public fund

There's a long history of progressive proposals to tax big tech, but the bill Senator Bernie Sanders just put forward, reported exclusively by the Associated Press, goes somewhere different. It does not ask the largest AI companies for cash. It asks them for stock, and a lot of it.

The mechanism, according to the AP's reporting, is a one-time 50% tax levied in shares on AI companies that reach $200 million in annual AI sales. Those shares would feed a sovereign wealth fund that Sanders estimates at nearly $7 trillion, managed by a seven-person independent commission nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. A 5% annual dividend would, per the bill summary, send more than $1,000 a year to every American, with the rest funneled into health care, education and housing. 'The benefits cannot simply go to the handful of wealthy corporations,' Sanders told the AP. 'They will be shared by the American people.'

The pitch is partly economic and partly political. Sanders points to anxieties already showing up in the data, including a 2025 poll by the Institute of Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School that found about 70% of college students see AI as a threat to their job prospects, and to private valuations like Anthropic's recent $965 billion mark that have made a small group of executives extraordinarily wealthy before the technology has been broadly deployed. His argument is that giving the public voting shares, not just a check, is what would actually let ordinary people 'block decisions that hurt' them.

Take the specifics as proposed, not as enacted. The $7 trillion figure rests on Sanders's own assumptions about future AI equity values, the bill has not been scored or moved through committee, and a forced transfer of stock at this scale would draw immediate constitutional challenges the AP reporting does not adjudicate. What the story does establish is that the framing of 'how should the public benefit from AI' is moving from windfall taxes and profit-sharing toward direct ownership, and that shift is the part worth watching, regardless of whether this particular bill ever gets a vote.