The American A.I. Sovereign Wealth Fund Act

I.What it is

A bill to amend the Internal Revenue Code with an excise tax on “systemically important AI activity.” The tax is paid in stock rather than cash, and its size is fixed by its purpose: enough newly issued shares that, the moment it is paid, the U.S. Treasury holds fifty percent of the company. Those shares flow into a new American A.I. Sovereign Wealth Fund, managed by an Independent Commission for Democratic AI, which votes them and draws an annual dividend from the fund for the public. Sanders estimates the fund at roughly seven trillion dollars at current valuations, and a first per-person dividend above one thousand dollars.

The governing claim sits in the findings, and it is one we have made for two years: AI is a public resource that derives its value from humanity’s collective intelligence — books, songs, journalism, code, research, conversation, images, ideas across generations — and when a public resource generates wealth, the public should share in it.

II.The mechanism

The tax falls on any corporation or partnership in an “applicable AI trade or business” — AI data centers, AI computing infrastructure, AI services, or advanced robotics — with more than two hundred million dollars in annual gross receipts from those lines. Receipts, not profit, is the deliberate choice: it reaches the frontier labs precisely because most of them lose money. “AI services” is pinned to a compute threshold — models trained on ten-to-the-twenty-fifth operations or more, adjusted yearly for efficiency — so the net is technical, not nominal.

The fifty percent is taken in newly issued stock, diluting existing holders rather than buying them out, and the statute overrides any corporate charter limit standing in the way. A perpetual top-up keeps the public at half: every later issuance, including employee options and grants as they vest, triggers more tax. An anti-inversion clause treats any AI company that flees offshore as domestic anyway. Underpay and the fifty percent becomes sixty; fail to file and a million-dollar penalty attaches.

III.The fund and the dividend

The fund draws five percent of its average market value each year, less administration. It may not sell its shares, and it may not be used to bail out a failing AI company. The dividend funds direct payments and a floor of decent provision — health care, education, housing, a habitable environment — as Congress directs. The model is named outright: Alaska’s permanent fund, fifty years of oil dividends; Texas’s 1845 school fund; the hundred-plus sovereign wealth funds in sixty-seven countries. The bill’s wager is that AI rents can do for the nation what oil rents did for Juneau.

IV.The commission

Seven commissioners, presidentially appointed and Senate-confirmed, drawn from bipartisan lists supplied by congressional leaders — a chair, a vice-chair, and seats reserved for labor, for institutional-fund fiduciaries, for AI governance, for privacy, and for public safety. No more than four may share a party. They must divest, may not have worked for a covered company in the prior two years, may not sit on its board, hold their assets in blind trust, and face a five-year cooling-off period on exit. They are removable only for cause, which makes them independent in the way the Fed and the FTC are independent.

Two provisions give the commission teeth. It takes the largest number of board seats the fifty percent will bear and directs those seats toward worker welfare, fair competition, sustainability, and solvency. And it rewrites the directors’ duty: advancing those public goals is declared a proper purpose consistent with fiduciary obligation even where it conflicts with the financial interests of the company or its shareholders — overriding state corporate law and even public-benefit-corporation duties, and immunizing such votes from challenge. An antitrust firewall bars the commission from coordinating competitors it part-owns; a transparency rule forces quarterly, machine-readable disclosure of every vote.

V.The provision no one is discussing

Section 4 orders the FTC to require structural separation: each covered company must hive its AI business off into a pure-play entity — no non-AI lines, no shared officers or directors, no cross-financing, no joint ventures — before the tax attaches. This is a breakup mandate riding inside a tax bill. Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, and the newly merged SpaceX–xAI would each have to set their AI core loose as a standalone company, half of which then passes to the public. It is the most genuinely structural element in the text, and the least reported.

VI.Lineage, and where it diverges from us

The bill belongs to the social-democratic, sovereign-wealth tradition — Norway and Alaska — not to the distributed-ownership tradition this guide is built around. That is the line worth marking. Kelso’s binary economics imagined a nation of owners, each person holding capital and the income from it. Lowitzsch’s citizen-funds (see his entry) were designed to put shares in citizens’ hands, voted by them or by their cooperatives. Sanders puts the shares in the Treasury, voted by a commission, with the public holding a dividend rather than a deed. It maximizes distribution and governance; it socializes ownership through the state rather than democratizing it among the producers. The dividend is an allowance, not a standing — it cannot be voted, bequeathed, borrowed against, or carried into a co-op.

There is a sharpened irony in the findings, which cite the AI companies’ own proposals back at them: OpenAI’s “public wealth fund,” Anthropic’s call to “distribute AI-derived wealth more equitably,” Musk’s “universal high income.” The labs proposed the genre; Sanders wrote the bill. The same instrument, note, would serve a golden-share presidency as readily as a democratic one — which is the hazard worth holding alongside the promise (see Held in Trust).

VII.Why it is here

Because the premise has crossed from manifesto into legislative text, and that is news regardless of the bill’s odds. The Overton window, not the vote count, is the event. We log it as an ally: it would put a labor seat in every AI boardroom and a dividend in every pocket, and a politics that cannot manage even that is unserious. We log its limit too: a public that is paid from the share is not yet a public that holds it.