Big AI Companies Required to Transfer Half of Their Shares: A Year Ago Radical, Now Supported by 69%

69% of U.S. citizens are in favor of requiring artificial intelligence companies to transfer half of their shares to a public sovereign fund. This data comes from a survey by research firm Verasight, conducted in June with 1,690 adults, and illustrates how quickly an idea once considered marginal has become a majority position.

According to Benjamin Leff, CEO of Verasight, "in the eyes of the public, sovereign funds on AI are seen as a tool to redistribute the profits generated by the AI industry back to society." In June, Senator Bernie Sanders introduced the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, which would grant the public a 50% stake in the largest U.S. AI companies. Sanders described it as a fund of approximately $7 trillion, based on the thesis that the public has financed research and infrastructure and therefore should share in the returns.

"It would ensure that the economic benefits generated by AI are used to improve the lives of all of us, and not just to make the world's richest men even richer," the senator stated last month. "The future of AI and the fate of humanity must not be decided behind closed doors in Silicon Valley by billionaires looking to maximize their power and profit." This sentiment is shared by others: Senator Ed Markey's AI Accountability Agenda lists wealth sharing from AI among its six priorities.

Why the Climate Has Changed

In the background is a labor market that continues to absorb bad news: in the first half of 2026, the tech sector represented almost one-third of layoffs in the U.S., with AI increasingly cited as the cause, while the same companies are ramping up capital spending to expand their capabilities in artificial intelligence.

Projections are bleaker. Joseph Briggs, Senior Global Economist at Goldman Sachs, estimates that over 9% of the workforce, about 15 million workers, could lose their jobs during a decade-long transition toward AI. This would be, he explained, "the type of automation and reallocation shock seen in the late 1990s and early 2000s" and in other phases of significant technological change. However, the same report specifies that Briggs believes these losses will be temporary, waiting for AI to generate many new jobs in the long term while it destroys existing ones.

Objections

For critics, it amounts to a forced transfer of private ownership disguised as a dividend: expropriating half of a company’s capital would deter investment and push AI development abroad. Some also contest the premise itself. Sam Altman has argued that an employment apocalypse due to AI is unlikely, and if he is right, a policy built on the assumption of mass layoffs would be addressing a poorly posed problem. Additionally, there is the formulation of the survey: asking if companies should be "required" to cede shares guides the response more than a question about trade-offs, and pollsters have long known that abstract redistribution garners more support than its concrete details.

The issue of how such a fund would function in practice remains open. According to research firm Windfall Trust, a sovereign fund could finance AI infrastructure and capture part of the sector's profits for the treasury, but it would have to manage an internal conflict: "there is a tension between the financial mandate to maximize returns for citizens, and the strategic mandate to build national capacity in AI and maintain influence over cutting-edge systems, as these goals may conflict when the best financial investment is a foreign AI company rather than a domestic one."

Sanders' bill is unlikely to pass in this Congress. Meanwhile, other countries are resorting to more direct tools: in China, some courts have ruled that replacing a worker with AI is not a legitimate reason for termination, a protection without equivalents in the U.S. or Europe. In any case, the public debate is shifting: the question is no longer whether citizens will have a right to a share of AI profits, but in what form.