Just ban running them on a loss. Maybe even ban running anything at a loss in order to curb competition, etc.
Kurt Vonnegut’s “Player piano” nailed it in 1952:
Automation makes factories more efficient, tax that efficiency and give it back to the displaced workers.
Of course, since then, we’ve been doing nothing but lowering corporate taxes…
I think that’s a traditional part of anti-monopoly laws, shame nobody enforces those anymore
Anti-monopoly laws have been problematic to enforce since their inception, because their targets are often as powerful as the government that might dare to regulate them.
I wonder if this is some sneaky way to make sure they aren’t bailed out by the public when the crash happens. The companies will revolt against this. And then when they coming running for a bailout we can just say “well you didn’t want to be publicly owned”
check my math:
0.5 x 0 = 0
50% might have been a fair cut if they actually asked for permission up front,but they didn’t. Everything made by AI is fruit if the poison tree and should be something equal to public domain.
50% seems very low. They created these companies by scraping and pirating information.
50% means that they just need to fool a few people to get what they want. Imo it should be more like 90% public with a requirement that all services must be provided for free.
Almost everyone in this thread seems to be assuming the US would pay for half the shares/equity of these companies.
That is not what is being proposed.
What is being proposed is that the US Govt simply seize half the shares/equity/board voting powers in these companies, without paying a cent for them.
It is a half-nationalization.
Not a half-bailout.
EDIT
I go into more detail and explain in this comment in this same thread:
US Govt simply seize half the shares/equity/board voting powers in these companies, without paying a cent for them.
they still have half the liability.
What liability?
What does that even mean?
If I own a stock, a share of a company… what does that make me liable for, just owning the stock?
Do you think that like, if I own a stock, and the company gets sued or something… I personally have to help the company pay out the damages the company is liable for?
No that’s not how stocks or the law works.
If the company’s stock decreases in value after people hear about it having to pay out from a court case, then yeah the stock has less value now… but the government seized the stock, it got it for $0 dollars.
So there’s no net loss.
Good clarification. I’m convinced we will end up bailing them out anyway. We should nationalize and operate as a public good if generative AI is that important to society.
I genuienly struggle to think of a kind of economic thing that better qualifies as a public utility.
Completely agree that this kind of technology, with such broad and immense ongoing, as well as potential implications, cannot be allowed to be directed by the whims of wealthy capitalist conmen rent seekers.
Nationalization doesn’t change the fact that for example OpenAI plans to burn $100B in 2026 without any profit so taxpayers will inherit $50B debt just from 2026. Moreover it doesn’t stop those companies for raising more debt from for example corporate bonds emission just by saying 50% of their capital is government owned. That would allow them to literally raise trillions.
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2025/12/30/openais-cash-burn-will-be-one-of-the-big-bubble-questions-of-2026
https://archive.ph/8Ej9zIf OpenAI fails, and the government owns half of it…
The assets and power the government acquired for no monetary cost simply becomes zero.
The other part of simply seizing half the shares is that the government (presumably a number of ministers/officials in charge of the new sovereign wealth fund) now has half the voting power of the entire board.
That is a pretty direct way to wield influence as to the decisions the company can make, how the CEO can behave.
You want maybe the accounting to actually deprecate the GPUs they have or lease over a realistic timeframe, instead of a totally bullshit one?
Half of your shareholders now demand this.
C Suite refuse to comply?
Begin the process of firing them.
OpenAI don’t own any GPU, they lease it from Microsoft or from Oracle. Oracle bought GPU by emitting billions of dollars of corporate bonds. OpenAI only owns AI models that they copy to datacenters. Same is with Anthropics. They own no datacenter or GPU they just lease it from other parties.
Bernie Sanders is putting taxpayers responsible for overspending on datacenters and make datacenters bailout. He should propose that all models should be open to public if they are used by government organizations so it can be independently audited by researchers. That would prevent those companies to cause harm to people.
xAI is now (or will very soon be) part of SpaceX.
They physically own massive ‘Colossus’ datacenters with tons of GPUs.
As to leasing vs owning, I already addressed that.
If you are the government and you are half of the shareholders, you can pressure your own AI company, or the companies from whom your AI company leases GPUs from to be more honest and transparent regarding accounting methodologies.
Bernie is not proposing that any taxpayer money be put toward this at all.
The only actual expense here would be the minute cost of simply hiring some people to run and manage the sovereign wealth fund. Miniscule in comparison to the potential equity value of $$$s being managed. Think something like the administrative cost of running say, the SEC or FTC, in comparison to the amount of money moving around that they can affect.
He is proposing the government simply half nationalize these companies, as Trump not long ago did with TikTok.
If the government is half of every US based AI company’s board, they can also very effectively pressure them to make the models open source.
Not sure if you don’t understand the concept of nationalization, but basically, thats when the government looks at something and says ‘i own this now, because I say so’.
Theres no payment. Its… why I use the word ‘seize’.
Same way Marx argued that workers should ‘seize’ the means of production: Just take them.
xAI is now (or will very soon be) part of SpaceX
xAI bought twitter in '25, and then Space-X bought xAI in Feb of this year. So it’s already done, and twitter is a bonus!
You’re right!
I was mixing up the acquisition/merger and IPO timelines.
SpaceX is another flop. It’s main income is from NASA. $30B in long term debt, they estimate $1.75T valuation only year they showed any profit was in 2024 and it was $242M. Just to compare the private company that literally landed on moon Firefly Aerospace is worth $7B valuation debuted last year. -38% on NASDAQ. I’m not from US you’re living in some bad dream right now. Wake up people because they are fucking you in the ass and you’re clapping.
SpaceX is another flop. It’s main income is from NASA
For perspective SPCX is mostly (74%) a service company for Starlink.
I agree that SpaceX is a fiscal shitshow.
Would you rather own half of it for no cost?
Or own none of it for no cost?
If you own half of it for no cost, you have a substantial ability to … tell it what to do, with its people, its assets, its stuff, its technology.
If you own none of it for no cost, you do not have this ability.
In both scenarios, if the stock value goes to zero, you lose nothing, because you paid nothing.
Again, you seem to be struggling with the concept of nationalization.
The government just takes stuff over, because it says so, and it is the government.
No one is compensated, no one is paid.
In the US, cops can do this thing called asset seizure.
You get pulled over for a dead taillight.
You own a carwash and you’re on your way to deposit the month’s excess cash into the business account at your bank.
Cop decides you smell like marijuana, finds your cash and your well kept accounting records.
Doesn’t matter, that might be drug money, cops take the money.
Imagine that, but with stocks instead.
But is it critical infrastructure ?
Country should own roads, hospitals, power plants, water, lend land for farmers instead of Bill Gates owning 1 / 4000 of your farm land, communal housing, things that serve people so country should make sure everyone have access to it. Not what serve corporations and rich and push money there. Probably half of your 401k money are already there if you follow the dots.
It would be better to nationalize or buy office buildings from corporations and use this money. Tax their assets from tax havens. Tax them until instead of crying they start begging. Now your country are treating those companies like little babies.
You have different mindset, that’s what I’m trying to explain.
You should have free healthcare and free education like in Europe. Cheap transportation across country in trains, bike lanes. Cheap food and houses. Be happy. Why you can’t travel by train from New York to Los Angeles ? Russia that everyone laughs from and hates because their politicians are idiots, they can travel from Moscow to Vladivostok.
Instead of that you’re launching farts towards moon and chasing demons in computers.
People over power.
True but most of the value of these LLMs comes from ingesting data produced by the public, with a healthy amount of copyrighted data.
Would you be in favour of class action lawsuits to compensate for the intellectual theft instead?
No, not instead.
In addition to, sure.
Class action lawsuits as a primary counter action to damages?
… why not just … stop the damages from happening?
If you have 50% of the shares, you have a controlling interest on the board.
You can significantly just tell the company what to do, what policies to have.
Going through through the courts to compensate the damage after the fact is massively more expensive and time consuming… its hitting someone with your car and they paying their medical bill 2 years later.
Why not just not hit them with the car?
If this ever passed, I bet we’d see a pretty quick devaluation in these things.
I’m okay with that. The bubble is going to burst eventually.
Does this mean we’ll all be bag holders when the AI bubble bursts?
We are already holding the bag.
They are “too big to fail”
It is the de way
They’re very much not. They have high valuations, but very few employees. Very different to the banks (where the public would lose money) and the car firms (who employed large numbers of workers)
Guess where the publics money is invested?
Pensions and other investments, yes.
Not current accounts which was what was at risk in 2008. When the bank goes bust you don’t just lose money. You become unable to do anything financial, like get paid.
We didn’t just bail the banks in 2008.
Now do the US Auto Makers.
Who are still making terrible decisions
Read the thread. Already did that.
How? The government doesn’t plan to compensate the companies.
Are you new here? The government will absolutely compensate the companies when the bubble bursts.
Yes but not when it seizes half the companies
They already are! The government signed exclusive military contracts with OpenAI to develop autonomous weapons. Half of these AI companies are being propped up with taxpayer dollars in the form of government contracts or subsidies, or the promise that there will be a taxpayer revenue stream coming their way in the near future.
That’s for technology, not for equity.
The point being, if the public owns half of the company but the company is failing, now the public has acquired 50% liability of a dying business.
Like others said though, I’m sure taxpayers will be on the hook either way.
Do these companies have liabilities?
You know they will agree and give everyone stakes exactly when bubble is about to pop
Public stake isn’t for profits (especially not short term capital gains), it’s about concentration & not getting controlled.
Controlling something worthless is pointless anyway.
And giving it away to everyone will score political points.
Wdym away to everyone?
You didn’t read the article, or you didn’t understand it.
The US Govt would not pay a cent for the shares of these companies.
It would simply seize them, half-nationalize them.
Its a half nationalization, not a half bailout.
First of all, fuck no. Remove all of the AI companies. Now. Secondly, this will guarantee they become “too big to fail”. Like, it feels as if they’re purposefully doing this to make it palatable to bail them out.
I think the intention is to get the profits of automation to the people when more jobs are inevitably automated.
It is, but unintended consequences.
With this, then we couldn’t afford Sam Altman to experience failure because he will drag folks down with him. So the companies invested become too big to fall, and the still private leadership gets to run things however they wish knowing the government will cover for any mistakes.
It’s bad enough as the government will panic about retirement accounts when they falter, this exacerbates it.
It’s a risky form of private-public partnership, with a lot of ways the company can privatize rewards but socialize the risk.
it actually creates symetry for risk/reward, but it does incentivize giving skynet contracts with argument that people get 50% of the proceeds from skynet abuse.
Doesn’t really create symmetry for risk/reward, because, for example, the corporate leadership decides how much to pay out to investors versus how much they spend including a lot of their own compensation.
So they can carve out the reward as they see fit, but if things go bad they can lean on the public investment as leverage to get bailouts.
I agree. No public funds should go to AI. No taxpayer money should be used to construct AI or datacenters. When the AI companies start to collapse, they should receive no bailouts.
Bailouts are corruption. Why do the rich get socialism and the rest of us get crushing capitalism? When we fail, we get stepped on. When the rich fail, they get billion dollar bailouts? But they claim they deserve to keep all their riches because they worked hard for it?
I could be a billionaire oligarch too if all of my failures were compensated for with billion dollar bailouts. It’s not hard to succeed when you are elevated to the heights of the gods every time you face a little adversity.
This feels like a setup to the biggest rug-pull in history. The whole thing is going to shit and the taxpayers will be holding the bags.
50% is very specific and very fishy on bernies part, is he being paid by them to say this. benefit of the doubt he isnt, but many DINOs are currently being paid by AI companies to force datacenters into thier states.
Bruh they are working on deregulating debt swaps so they can hide how much leverage is going into these build outs. Trillions of dollars of data centers with mortgages and rent to own NVDA chips. its looking like the greatest scam of all time rn.
These AI companies rushing to do IPOs so the public’s retirement account index funds can buy them up and take the loss for them, too.
These people need to suffer real consequences.
I think it makes sense. The bill will be paid off from taxes, so it makes sense that the bailout comes with company stock transfer to workers.
It’s fair for many reasons. One of them is that billionaires and corporations don’t pay taxes.
What about, instead of 50%, make the bailed out company be 100% owned by the people - not the government, the people.
By the time the public own it, it will be a liability, not an asset. I’ve seen my government purchase a telco’s entire infrastructure only to immediately write it off.
Just set it on fire already.
yep lol and thats how it will work. we’ll get a bunch of data centers with a 5 year lifespan and 30 years of debt strapped to them.
You didn’t read the article, or you didn’t understand it.
The US Govt would not pay a cent for the shares of these companies.
It would simply seize them, half-nationalize them.
Its a half nationalization, not a half bailout.
Wait.
Remove?
… How? From what?
What does that even mean?
… the point of this is to essentially half nationalize the companies.
No public money would be used to purchase these assets / equity shares. The government would simply seize them.
Is this a perfect solution? Fuck no.
Is it significantly better than the public having 0 effective say in what huge megacorps do? The public bearing the socialized costs of profilgate profit maximization of AI companies, the gains all being funnelled upward toward the already wealthy to super to hyper to uber wealthy?
Uh probably almost certainly yes.
Specifically, Sanders proposes a one-time transfer of 50 percent of equity from companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI to the government. The idea: since AI is built on the accumulated knowledge, creativity, conversations, and labor of the American people — typically without permission or payment — the American people deserve a cut of the profits.
This is not ‘public/government money buys out half the equity of AI companies’.
This is ‘we are the government and we own half of you now, because we say so, fuck you’.
The fund would acquire half the stock of the largest AI companies in the country through a mandated equity transfer — Sanders is explicit that this is not a profits tax. The government would then hold voting shares and receive equal board representation at each company, giving it formal power to block decisions deemed harmful to the public.
It is literally ‘we own half your equity now, and have half the voting rights on your board(s)’.
So basically that would be something like doing a stock split.
In a standard stock split, private stock holders who used to own one share, now they own two shares of half the original share’s value. 2 * 1/2 = 1.
But with this, this is more like the private stock owners… the split happens, they still own the one share, but its value has been halved, and now the US government owns the other share.
2 * 1/2 = 1/2 {government/public} + 1/2 {private stock holders}
Then, those stocks owned by the US government get put into essentially a new government organization that would manage those stocks snd finances, as a soveriegn wealth fund.
The top of the K, the wealthiest 10% to 1% that own 90% or whatever of all stocks/equities… they all get a 50% haircut on their AI holdings.
And the proceeds get put toward the people.
Its not technically a wealth tax per se, but it accomplishes a similar thing, in a targeted and managed way.
Anyone who thinks this is ‘the US government is gonna buy half the AI stocks’ is mistaken.
That isn’t what is being proposed, ya’ll either didn’t read the article, or don’t know finance terminology.
The latter I can at least understand, but I absolutely must explain and correct the mistake.
well said. The problem is they are overvalued anyway… so we take half of a trillion dollar company that only worth 30% of that number, so we take a big ass loss. unless we are just straight up taking half and there’s no compensation provided. can’t imagine the SRCOTUS riding with that policy.
Always seeing these kinds of messages and kinda curious, I guess you mean LLMs with all AI and not truly all ai? Cause there are a lot more stuff under that umbrella term thats super useful for example in medicine etc
Yes, LLMs, the article refers to it in that manner so I did too.
Funny - bis Argument is : ai is built in human collective knowledge thus wie should participate in the profits and … Give it all to americans
Dont get me wrong i like the sentiment - but seems like it comes down to - ai was built by THe collective knowledge of all humans - the profits should go to all americans
I mean however unlikely this law is to pass it would be outright impossible if the idea was to take 50% of AI profits and then somehow mail checks to every person on earth, even outside of the country doing the profit distribution
Other countries are free to do that for any LLMs developed in their own jurisdiction.
What happens when they go bust?
Maybe we all get to enjoy a massive tax write off like a big business
But the government will actually own it, not you and me. So the government will write of its taxes to itself?
I have no idea lol
Better idea: drive a stake 50% through AI CEO’s chest. Better, faster results, not just economically, but ecologically too!
They’ll just elect another.
Stakes are reusable.
As the French showed if enough heads roll you may end your monarchy. Might flirt with a dictator in the process, but that can also be taken care of
Yeah but the dictator will kill the sans-culottes who get uppity and the response to excess headrolling is reaction and moderation of the more radical goals of the process. Burn the guillotine, as the Parisian communards did.
That just raises CEO salaries because it proves my ongoing theory that CEOs get paid as much as they do to take the fall for everything the company does so the shareholders don’t lose money.
Please don’t throw sand in the eyes of things you don’t agree with
Said the robber to his victim.
Alright listen, I don’t carry around all this sand in my pockets for nothing.
50% sounds fair
No.
100% is fair.
They stole every bit of what they used to build this shit sandwich.
Wouldn’t this make everyone interested in the bad business practices that would increase the profits?
It makes sure that the public benefits from mass automation.
Yes but stocks go up when AI gets more market power, exploits more privacy, sells more data to vested interests. The public would then have an interest in all that. Or at least this interest would compete with privacy interests. It may make it harder to push the company to do something, no?
Government. We are not the government.
https://cdn.mises.org/anatomy-of-the-state.pdf
It’s a very short book. And it’s covered pretty convincingly in the first chapter no less.
More likely in would just exarcerbate the financial instability of the AI industry and hasten its downfall, which I’m all for
Or delay it. How would the government having 50% stake in an industry make it less stable? Now the government will form policy around protecting its stake. This will delay a collapse that we should want to happen sooner than later, and ideally be as divested from as possible.
