Poll: 69% of Americans support state taking half of AI equity
A new survey shows broad US support for a radical bill that would seize half of Big AI's equity, signalling a political climate shift that threatens to upend the operating environment for the world's leading tech firms.
Nearly seven in ten Americans support forcing the largest US artificial intelligence companies to hand over half of their stock to a public sovereign wealth fund. A Verasight survey of 1,690 US adults conducted in June found 69% backing for the policy at the heart of Bernie Sanders’s American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act.
The senator introduced the legislation in June, pitching it as a roughly $7 trillion fund. He argues that because the public funded the underlying research and infrastructure, the public is entitled to a share of the returns. "The public sees such funds as a way to route the gains of the AI industry back to society," Verasight chief executive Benjamin Leff said.
For European investors and policymakers, this represents a sudden political risk to the transatlantic tech giants that dominate the global AI market. The proposal goes far beyond the EU’s current regulatory focus on AI safety, instead targeting the fundamental ownership structure of American technology companies. Senator Ed Markey has also listed "sharing the AI wealth" among his six AI accountability priorities.
The shift in public opinion is driven by a widening gap between corporate investment and employment. Tech firms accounted for close to a third of US layoffs in the first half of 2026, frequently citing AI as the reason. Simultaneously, those same companies are significantly raising their AI capital expenditure.
The projections fuelling this resentment are stark. Goldman Sachs economist Joseph Briggs has estimated that more than 9% of the US labour force, roughly 15 million workers, could lose their jobs over a decade-long AI transition. This juxtaposition of record investment alongside mass firings is validating the wealth-transfer argument for voters.
Critics warn that seizing half of a company’s equity would chill investment and simply drive AI development offshore. Sam Altman has argued that an AI jobs apocalypse is unlikely, suggesting the policy is a solution to the wrong problem. There are also methodological caveats, as pollsters note that abstract redistribution questions typically score higher than polls detailing specific trade-offs.
The American debate is diverging sharply from other global approaches to managing the technology's fallout. Chinese courts have ruled that replacing a worker with AI is not lawful grounds for termination, establishing a labour protection that currently has no equivalent in either the US or the EU. While Sanders’s bill will not pass the current Congress, the data indicates the political framework has shifted from whether AI will displace workers to who should own the technology's profits.
