Bill Gates Proposes Robot Tax to Replace FICA Revenue

Bill Gates proposed that companies replacing human workers with robots or artificial intelligence should pay the same FICA payroll taxes as human employees. In an interview with The New York Times, Gates argued that taxing automated labor is necessary to maintain government tax revenue and provide a monetary safety net for citizens displaced by technology.

Gates stated that society must decide how to support workers regardless of whether labor is delivered by a human or a robot, noting that economic signals favoring lower-cost AI should not dictate societal outcomes. This proposal builds on his previous advocacy for taxing AI tokens to fund retraining programs and a stronger social safety net.

Other industry leaders have expressed similar views on the economic disruption caused by automation. Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, and representatives from OpenAI have called for tax policies targeted at AI companies or automated labor to distribute the economic gains of the technology more broadly across society.