Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said Monday he will introduce the American A.I. Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, a bill that would force the largest US AI companies to hand over half their equity to a federally managed fund. He laid out the plan in a New York Times op-ed and a roughly seven-minute video, naming OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI as targets.
The mechanism is the part that will keep Silicon Valley lawyers up at night. Not a tax on profits, which companies know how to fight. A one-time 50 percent levy paid in stock. The shares go into a sovereign wealth fund, the government gets voting shares and board representation, and revenue eventually flows to ordinary Americans as cash payments and, later, healthcare, education, and housing.
Where the idea comes from
Sanders is upfront that he didn't invent this. He points to Norway's oil fund and the Alaska Permanent Fund, which cuts annual dividend checks to residents. He also notes, with some relish, that even Trump floated a US sovereign wealth fund via executive order during his first month back in office.
The stranger detail: the AI companies themselves have flirted with versions of this. OpenAI published a policy paper in April calling for a public wealth fund giving every citizen a stake in AI-driven growth. Anthropic, run by Dario Amodei, has floated national sovereign wealth funds holding AI assets too. So the broad concept of "the public should own a slice" isn't fringe. What separates Sanders is the compulsion and the scale. The companies imagined something voluntary and modest. He wants half, mandatory, with board seats.
The argument, and the hole in it
Sanders frames it around ownership of the inputs. AI got built on the accumulated knowledge, creativity, and labor of millions of people, scraped without acknowledgment or compensation, so the public has a claim on the output. It's a clean line and it polls well.
"AI is being built on a public resource far more valuable than oil: the accumulated knowledge, creativity, and labor of mankind." Maybe. The trouble is that oil is a thing you can meter and sell, and "the accumulated knowledge of mankind" is not, which is exactly the kind of gap the actual legislative text will have to close and currently doesn't.
And that's the catch. There is no bill yet. Sanders says the details, including spending priorities and the mechanics of how you value and seize half of a private company's equity, are coming "in the coming weeks." Until then this is a political frame, not a legal instrument. Valuing OpenAI's stock alone is contested. Forcing a transfer of half of it raises constitutional questions about takings that the op-ed doesn't touch.
Not as unthinkable as it sounds
The reason the proposal isn't pure fantasy is that the federal government already did a version of it. In August 2025 the US took a roughly 10 percent stake in Intel through an $8.9 billion deal, funded largely by converting unpaid CHIPS Act grants into equity at $20.47 a share. That stake has since ballooned in value after Intel's stock ran up, an outcome nobody in Washington planned.
So the precedent for the state owning a chunk of a strategic tech company exists. The difference is one of degree that becomes a difference in kind. Ten percent of one chipmaker, paid for with money already committed, is a long way from half of every large AI firm, taken in a one-time grab. The Intel deal also had a willing counterparty. Sanders is proposing the opposite.
Sanders will release the full text in the coming weeks. Until that drops, there's no way to judge whether the seizure mechanism survives contact with a lawyer.
