This is a linkpost for https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/01/opinion/artificial-intelligence-bernie-sanders.html
New Comment
What is the mechanism whereby this nationalisation of the AI industry will "guarantee that the trillions of dollars potentially generated by A.I. are used to improve the lives of all of us"?
1"guarantee" is certainly excessive, but the argument is that the US federal government is controlled by the US general public ("us") and thus will not allow severe degradation of the lives of that public.
To put this more concretely, the idea is a sovereign wealth fund. The comparison is made to Norway. Is Norway's wealth fund accomplishing this goal? Well, returns are used to help fund the annual budgets, and the budgets mostly benefit the people, so at least to some extent yes. Not prima facie unreasonable then?
As much as we may be skeptical of the US federal government's wisdom, or indeed the idea that anyone other than AI itself may capture the lion's share of value in the end, I think it is preferable that ownership of AGI not be heavily concentrated nor fully private.[1][2]
- ^
Technically, an aligned ASI not "owned" by anyone is probably better, but we could posit that this is mostly for the post-AGI, pre-ASI phase.
- ^
Even if private charity from AGI/ASI owners pulls through and the erstwhile permanent underclass all get their own moons, I still think at least some shared ownership is worthwhile, both to avoid concentration of power and also to maintain human dignity. Obviously the US-centric nature of Senator Sanders' proposal doesn't solve this for most of humanity, but I think it's still, as they say, directionally correct.
the argument is that the US federal government is controlled by the US general public ("us")
I find this breathtakingly naive, especially given the regime most recently voted in by the US general public. I certainly wouldn't expect better of any government than the current leaders of the major AI companies, and in fact, considerably worse.
Politics warning:
The Trumpists will bleed the goose to line their own pockets, while the Dems (if they ever get back in) will wring its neck for having the effrontery to be laying golden eggs without their permission.
I agree there's a substantial chance that any government would perform worse than the current leaders of major AI companies in the short term, esp. navigating the transition into widespread AGI or ASI. But once we reach a stable state, I'd rather have some kind of ownership/legitimized feedback mechanism available to humanity at large, and that may be more likely if there isn't narrow private ownership of AGI/ASI beforehand. (Democratic republics are, as the saying goes, the worst solution for maintaining the common good, except for all the other ones we've tried. Obviously actually good solutions rely on AGI/ASI just coming up with something better, but it would be kind of nice if we could then accept that idea democratically...)
Partial government ownership of AI labs seems likely to happen one way or another, simply because I think military leadership already understands correctly that AI labs will hold the potential for greater military power than the government does, and they'll want tighter control. They already have this any number of ways with companies that produce war materiel, so I expect them to demand it of AI labs, too.
Someone who is broadly anticapitalist making the case for the government nationalizing a new capital intensive industry doesn't seem that surprising.
As long as you're careful to always call it a "tax" (16th Amendment) and not a "taking" (5th Amendment), you should be fine.
I don't think that's quite how it works. I'd guess that a court would consider the substance of the law and not just whether it is phrased as a "tax". I think legislation like this would have a substantial risk of being declared unconsitutional on takings clause grounds.
I do not know if that would hold up if they're actually naming specific individuals (the shareholders) and demanding that they pay the tax in the form of shares (aka turning over property) rather than the dollar value of those shares. If they're not doing those things, I'm curious how they're targeting it.
And unless they're doing it in a way that doesn't grant the government voting rights, that's a guaranteed loss of control of those companies by current shareholders.
If you follow through some of the links you get to this paper which seems to suggest that the mechanism might be requiring issuance of new shares?
Issuance of new shares does not confiscate the shares previously held, but simply dilutes their value.
I'm not so convinced by their arguments. It has the vibe of trying hard to avoid seeming like a taking while accomplishing the same thing as a taking, which I would expect a court to pick up on and be skeptical of. Particularly with the existing composition of the Supreme Court I think its going to be hard to rely on such arguments.
2
Quoting from Senator Bernie Sanders Op-Ed in the New York Times today:
As you may know, Senator Bernie Sanders has recently started taking the idea of AGI/ASI much more seriously. Now he's proposing partial nationalization on the premise that AI is a uniquely valuable and important technology.[1] While this particular upcoming bill of his is rather unlikely to pass, I like that ideas are being proposed which are at least somewhat commensurate to the problem.
Quote from article: "Artificial intelligence will almost certainly be the most transformational technology in the history of the world."