Sen. Bernie Sanders wants the American public to own half of the country’s biggest AI companies. The Vermont independent outlined his proposal, called the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, in a New York Times op-ed on June 1, targeting firms like OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI with a one-time 50% tax on their stock.

The mechanism is straightforward in concept, if staggering in scale. The government would take equity stakes equal to half of these companies’ value, deposit those shares into a publicly governed fund, and distribute the returns to every American. Sanders estimates the fund could grow to $7 trillion, which would make it roughly seven times the size of Norway’s Government Pension Fund, the current gold standard for sovereign wealth.

How the fund would work

The seized equity would sit in a fund managed by an independent commission, not Congress, not the White House. Citizens would receive voting shares, giving them a say in corporate governance, and the fund would ensure public representation on company boards.

At a 5% annual distribution rate, Sanders projects the fund would deliver approximately $1,000 per person per year. That money could come as direct dividend payments or be funneled into public services like healthcare, housing, and education.

Sanders has framed the logic in populist terms. AI companies, he argues, built their products on the collective output of human labor, creativity, and data. The training sets that power large language models were scraped from the open internet, constructed from decades of publicly created content. If the raw material was collective, the argument goes, the returns should be too.

The political and market reality

No clear timeline exists for when the bill might actually be introduced or voted on beyond mid-June 2026. Sanders emphasized the proposal’s urgency during a CNN discussion on June 17, focusing on the need to prevent harm to ordinary people as AI reshapes the economy.

The comparison to Norway’s sovereign wealth model is instructive but imperfect. Norway built its fund gradually over decades from oil revenue, a natural resource the state already controlled. Sanders is proposing something far more aggressive: retroactive public ownership of private companies built on what he characterizes as a public resource. The legal challenges alone would be significant, with Fifth Amendment takings claims likely topping the list.

What this means for investors

The proposal forces a conversation about who actually captures the value these systems create. For investors holding positions in major AI companies, the immediate concern isn’t passage. It’s precedent. If the political conversation shifts toward equity-based redistribution rather than traditional corporate taxation, valuation models for the entire sector need to be recalibrated.

The practical likelihood of a 50% equity seizure becoming law in its current form is low. Investors should watch for watered-down versions that could gain bipartisan traction: smaller equity stakes, windfall profit taxes, or mandatory contributions to public AI research funds.