Fifty percent, paid in stock

The idea that the public should own a piece of the AI labs has floated around as a think-piece for years. Sam Altman proposed an American Equity Fund in 2021; OpenAI's 2026 policy paper revived it but quietly dropped the tax rate; Altman later offered Washington 5% of OpenAI outright. Bernie Sanders has now put a number back on it and made it mandatory. His American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act would levy a one-time tax on every AI business with more than $200 million in receipts — OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI and the big cloud players — and the tax is paid not in cash but in stock: half the company's equity, handed to a government fund.

Steve Bannon dismissed Altman's 5% offer to Washington as 'tip money' and demanded 50% — the same figure as Sanders.

The mechanism is the whole story. Taxing profits leaves the ownership untouched; taxing the stock makes the public a shareholder. Sanders reckons the fund would hold roughly $7 trillion at today's valuations, and a 5% dividend on that would mail every American a check north of $1,000 a year. A seven-member commission, confirmed by the Senate, would vote the shares to block harmful decisions.

The number is the part worth noticing. The bill is near-certain not to pass as written — analysts across the spectrum, from Reason to Cato, call it a non-starter — but 50% is no longer a fringe figure. Steve Bannon, coming from the opposite pole of American politics, dismissed Altman's 5% offer as 'tip money' and demanded the same half. So a socialist senator and a MAGA strategist have independently landed on identical terms, while the companies themselves float 5%. The public-stake question is no longer whether, among a widening cast, but how much — and the labs' own opening bid is an order of magnitude below what both flanks are now naming.

The catch the bill's own supporters raise is sharper than the passage odds. Security analyst Bruce Schneier, who wants the public to have a stake, opposes it anyway: making the government the labs' biggest shareholder ties the state's revenue to the labs' valuation, and a government that profits from AI is a poor candidate to regulate it. He points to Norway's oil fund, whose holdings, he argues, blunted the state's appetite for climate action. The instrument meant to give the public power over AI could instead make the government its most conflicted referee.