A Share of the Future, on the Labs' Terms

In June, within the span of a month, both parties put compulsory public ownership of the AI labs on the table. Bernie Sanders introduced a bill that would force OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI to surrender half their equity to a federally managed fund — a one-time ownership tax, with the government taking voting shares and board seats ^[1]. The administration was exploring the same territory from the other direction: federal funding in exchange for equity, taxes payable in stock ^[2]. The president framed it as a matter of taste.

where the American people can benefit from the success of AI, the American people will like it better — Donald Trump

The coverage of Sanders' bill carried the line that settled the axis.

This legislation would give the public a direct ownership stake in the largest A.I. companies in our country. — Bernie Sanders

The fight was never whether the public would get a share. It was whether the transfer could be compelled. Each counterbid has been the labs naming their terms. By late September the public had been primed for exactly this argument: 73% of American adults said AI companies had failed to prevent societal harm, and 55% favored slowing development ^[3]. The layoffs were arriving on schedule too. Barclays is cutting 5,000 jobs — most of them software developers — in an AI efficiency push, in the same week the funds were announced ^[4]. By late October, three counterbids were on record, each with a different level of confession. OpenAI was the earliest and the most explicit — its wealth-fund plan shared the late-October headlines ^[5] — and it had laid out the terms back in April, in a policy paper proposing a public wealth fund, a tax on automated labor, and subsidies for a 32-hour week ^[6]. The paper priced the fund directly against nationalization.

The transition to superintelligence will require an even more ambitious form of industrial policy, one that reflects the ability of democratic societies to act collectively, at scale, to shape their economic future so that superintelligence benefits everyone. — OpenAI

The drafting ran even earlier: a year before, the company had converted its for-profit arm into a public benefit corporation and seeded a $50 million nonprofit fund ^[7]. Musk timed his to the vote. On October 19, the day California decided Proposition 40 — a compulsory 5% wealth tax on billionaires — he announced a pledge of one SpaceX share to every American child ^[8]. The same week he issued his own warning.

they will eventually apply the ‘wealth tax’ to everyone — Elon Musk

Sergey Brin spent $102 million to defeat the measure ^[8]. Anthropic was the silent one. Six days before announcing its Public Benefit Fund, it published research showing its own staff expect AI to handle at least 80% of their job duties by 2030 ^[9]. Dario Amodei has said what the company is building.

We're publishing this research because Anthropic runs roughly a year and a half ahead of the economy on AI adoption, so what happens at Anthropic could be a leading indicator for the broader world. — Peter McCrory

The timing does the rest of the talking. The announcement came roughly two weeks before the scheduled mid-November listing ^[10]. And critics say its fine print — the limited-liability structure — keeps the company in control even as a fifth of the shares are promised to the public good ^[5]. The calendar sets the price for these bids. The listing will turn the founders' pledges into countable public wealth ^[10]. And the midterms are being fought over the very datacenters the labs need to build: at least 20 gubernatorial candidates have called for moratoriums, tech money has hit record levels, and Anthropic alone gave more than $40 million to the pro-regulation group Public First Action ^[11]. Meanwhile the industry's biggest winner was still running the opposite playbook. In May, at the Milken conference, Jensen Huang told the room what AI would do for American workers ^[12].

AI creates jobs — Jensen Huang

He also said what worried him.

AI is [the] United States’ best opportunity to re-industrialize — Jensen Huang

Nvidia has signed on to none of the funds. The fear behind them runs through the whole industry — it was the chipmaker who said it out loud. The payment comes only from the labs, the ones whose equity both parties proposed to take in June.