The White House proposal to put shares in big AI companies such as OpenAI into a kind of sovereign wealth fund for the general population gets two things right. First: AI will be a windfall for some, and devastating for others. Second: the gains from the technology’s boom show up as rising equity valuations, so if the goal is to minimise transition pain, that’s a good place to start.
But the idea of public ownership of AI companies, which in various forms has recently been put forward by President Donald Trump, progressive Senator Bernie Sanders and ChatGPT maker OpenAI, is not the way to go. Should participation be mandatory or optional? What even is an AI company? Would chipmaker Nvidia count, or data centre investor Blackstone, or a Wall Street bank that deploys AI and lays off workers?
Rather than bending capitalism out of shape, a better way to smooth AI’s rise is with a tool that exists: tax. No, not an AI-specific profit tax. Those, such as the “robot taxes” championed over the years by folks including Sanders, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and some New York state senators, would be complex and invite all kinds of definitional fuzziness.