Senator Bernie Sanders wants to take roughly $7 trillion from the AI industry and hand it to the American public. That’s not a typo, and it’s not a metaphor.

The Vermont senator introduced the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act in June 2026, proposing a one-time 50% tax on the stock of AI companies generating more than $200 million in annual AI-related revenue. The proceeds would flow into a sovereign wealth fund managed by an independent commission, with eligible Americans receiving voting shares and potential annual distributions of around $1,000 per person at a 5% distribution rate.

To put the scale in perspective: the projected $7 trillion fund would be nearly seven times larger than Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global, currently the world’s biggest sovereign wealth fund.

How the plan would actually work

The legislation targets any AI firm crossing the $200 million annual AI sales threshold. That captures the obvious names: OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and the major cloud providers with significant AI revenue streams. It also sweeps in any future company that reaches that benchmark, meaning the tax base would grow as the industry grows.

Rather than a traditional cash tax, the mechanism operates through equity seizure. The government would take a 50% stake in the stock of qualifying companies, transfer those shares into the sovereign wealth fund, and then distribute voting shares to American citizens. In English: the public wouldn’t just get a check. They’d get an ownership stake with governance rights in the companies building the most powerful technology on the planet.

Sanders framed the initiative around the idea that AI’s value derives from collective societal contributions, including public data, human labor, and creative works used to train large language models. His argument is straightforward: if the raw material was collectively produced, the wealth generated from it should be collectively owned.

The fund’s independent commission would manage the portfolio and determine distribution schedules. At a 5% annual distribution rate on $7 trillion, that works out to roughly $350 billion per year flowing back to the public, either as direct payments or funding for services like healthcare and education.

The political and corporate backdrop

This isn’t Sanders’ first swing at the AI industry in 2026. He and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced the AI Data Center Moratorium Act on March 25, targeting the rapid expansion of energy-hungry AI infrastructure. That bill sought to pause new data center construction pending environmental and community impact reviews.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reportedly met with Sanders in June 2026 to discuss the implications of public equity stakes in AI companies.

What this means for investors and the crypto-AI crossover

For crypto markets, the implications are layered. The AI-crypto crossover has become one of the most active sectors in digital assets, with tokens tied to decentralized AI compute, data marketplaces, and inference networks attracting significant capital. A regulatory environment that threatens centralized AI companies with massive equity dilution could, paradoxically, benefit decentralized alternatives. If building a large centralized AI company in the US becomes politically expensive, developers and capital might flow toward decentralized architectures that are harder to target with stock-based taxation.

There’s also the governance angle. Sanders’ proposal essentially creates a public DAO for AI oversight, minus the blockchain. Eligible Americans would hold voting shares in a collectively managed fund with influence over the companies inside it.