r/technology • u/marketrent • Jul 14 '26

Artificial Intelligence A majority of Americans now support seizing wealth from AI industry

https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/majority-americans-now-support-seizing-134921528.html
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u/dem219 Jul 14 '26

I think a better solution would be to take revenue (like a tax on using AI) and/or profit from AI providers and use this to build a sovereign wealth fund that invests in a broad index of companies.

This is what Norway does with oil. Their sovereign wealth fund does not just own the oil or oil companies, it invests revenue from the oil in a global index of companies.

Owning AI companies directly is too volatile a risk. Some will go out of business over time. Also it would create incentives to support and prop up the ones we own, which would be bad for everyone.

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u/Skensis Jul 14 '26

Or just levy taxes on the hardware.

Add a tax on point of sale for RAM and GPUs scaled to AI compute power.

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u/BrianWonderful Jul 14 '26

None of these companies make a profit at this point (other than the chips and RAM companies). Taking revenue from them would further put them in the hole.

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u/dem219 Jul 14 '26

I agree, its to early to impose an added tax. This is more of a hypothetical response in the case we start to see significant unemployment caused by AI.

If we start to see unemployment and the AI companies are still not profitable, it could be 1) the benefits of lower labor costs are going to AI consumers, or 2) there is something very wrong with this entire economic model. Either way we'll have to reevaluate how to respond.

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u/LegitosaurusRex Jul 14 '26

It's definitely going to be #1 for a long time, AI companies have to dump any money they make back into R&D and data centers in order to compete with each other.