Democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., is arguing that the federal government should establish a sovereign wealth fund that's financed by taking possession of half of the stock in AI giants like OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI, among others.
Sanders wrote an op-ed in The New York Times on Sunday that AI companies built and trained their models using the creative work of millions of people to inform generative AI tools, mostly without receiving permission from the creators or compensating them.
He explained that those creative works have "essentially been stolen by some of the wealthiest people in the world. It's time for us to reclaim it."
"Since AI is built on the collective knowledge of humanity, the wealth it generates must benefit humanity," Sanders wrote, rather than benefiting the founders of leading AI companies or "venture capitalists in Silicon Valley or money managers on Wall Street who undoubtedly see AI as the next great wealth-extracting machine."