‘The public will become very rich’: Should governments take a cut of the AI boom?

June 23, 2026 — 12:14pm

Artificial intelligence has the potential to disrupt and transform the way people work and live. Should those it will affect have a stake in the industry that could reshape their lives?

That’s a live question. Earlier this month, US President Donald Trump said he planned to meet AI executives to discuss precisely that. OpenAI and Anthropic have publicly raised the possibility of giving shares in their businesses to the government, or Americans as individuals. Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders has advocated a one-off 50 per cent tax on AI companies’ market values, with the proceeds to be held within a sovereign wealth fund.

Yet, the question might be premature.

We’re at the earliest phase of AI development and, while there is a lot of talk about how AI and AI-enabled robots will displace human labour and lead to mass unemployment and under-employment, there is, as yet, no clear picture of what an AI future might look like.

Disruptive technologies in the past have generated similar fears but have led to more, not less, employment with upgraded skills.

The idea of giving the government, or the population, financial exposure to the sector creating the disruption has, not surprisingly, been embraced by Trump, whose administration has already taken up, or announced plans to take up, stakes in at least 20 US companies ranging from Intel and Westinghouse to rare earths and quantum computing companies.

‘If we do that, the public will become very rich, the people in our country, because that’s the kind of money we’re talking about.’

“If we do that [take up stakes in AI companies], the public will become very rich, the people in our country, because that’s the kind of money we’re talking about,” he said earlier this month.

“You make them [the public] a partnership in this revolution,” he said.

Sanders, who has called AI “the most transformational technology in the history of the world,” argues that it has been built on the collective knowledge of generations, much of it collected without compensation through the theft of intellectual property by some of the wealthiest people in the world.

“Will the future of humanity be determined by a handful of billionaires [he should have said trillionaires] who have promoted and developed AI, with virtually no democratic input, who stand to become even richer and more powerful than they are today?” Sanders asked.

Having been built on the collective knowledge of humanity, the wealth AI generates must benefit humanity, he argues.

Those are legitimate questions although, as the $US800 billion ($1.14 trillion) slump in the market value of Elon Musk’s SpaceX from its post-listing peak last week highlights, the paper wealth Sanders wants to socialise and Trump is eyeing avariciously is volatile and fragile.

AI is extraordinarily capital-intensive and the companies pursuing frontier models are generating vast torrents of capital-devouring red ink as they develop their technology and the infrastructure to support it.

If, for any reason, they lost their access to capital – if there were a sharemarket crash, or they lost access to debt markets before AI companies’ finances reach some level of self-sustaining maturity – much of the sector would instantly implode.

‘Will the future of humanity be determined by a handful of billionaires who have promoted and developed AI, with virtually no democratic input, who stand to become even richer and more powerful than they are today?’

As the Trump administration’s previous investments in strategically important sectors demonstrates, the concept of governments pursuing industry policies isn’t novel, although the track record for such investments is mixed. Indeed, China’s AI and semiconductor sectors that are competing with the US for AI supremacy are being developed with Beijing’s direct financial support, including shareholdings.

If the US was to take up stakes in its AI companies, whether via a sovereign wealth fund or, as some have suggested, via individual AI share accounts for Americans, it would raise a number of problematic issues.

The most obvious is the conflict of interest.

The government, as the Trump administration demonstrated earlier this month when it banned Anthropic from exporting its latest models (and caused angst, bordering on panic, around the world), has the power to regulate the sector and, indeed, to destroy individual companies via regulation.

If it were a shareholder in Anthropic, would it have taken an action that could decimate the value of its shareholding? If American individuals held the shares directly, would the political implications of a ban have affected the decision?

Unless the government held shares of equal value in all AI companies and AI aspirants, which is impossible, would it be tempted to use its regulatory powers and or/taxpayer funds to favour those in which it has an interest over those in which it doesn’t? Would those companies seek favourable treatment from the government?

Would a level of government ownership create moral hazard – the companies would know that they are too close to government to be allowed to fail – and breed risk-aversion?

Would it undermine the competitive intensity and innovation that has made the US the leader in AI?

Would it impact the ability of AI companies to incentivise and reward talent, or hurt their ability to attract private capital in future, or change the cost of that capital compared to companies without a government stake? How would existing shareholders feel about the value of their holdings being diluted?

And would – as Open AI appears to have suggested – the shareholding be gifted to the government, or would it be paid for?

If paid for, the government would have a politically motivated interest in preserving and increasing its value. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg has said he would rather risk misspending hundreds of billions of dollars on AI than missing out on the AI opportunity. Could an elected government contemplate that, even if a failure to do so meant missing the opportunity?

Governments will be confronted with having to respond to the fallout from AI on their communities, whether it’s in jobs and social disruption, or energy costs or the threat that superintelligent AI might develop a mind of its own.

There’s a potential collision between the public interest and that of the government as a shareholder.

Unrestrained, profit-driven AI development might be good for shareholders and the billionaires (and the one trillionaire) driving it, but it could be very destructive to national security and the public interest.

What role could or should governments play in the governance of AI companies if they become stakeholders in the sector, rather than just its arm’s-length regulator?

Should they have board representation and share responsibility for decisions taken? Is there a risk of a political lens being brought to bear on companies’ decisions? Would an active role in governance deter investors, particularly foreign investors, from a sector that has an insatiable appetite for capital?

There are more questions than answers once the prospect of a government gaining direct stakes in companies it regulates becomes realistic and the lines between the regulator and those regulated threatens to become blurred.

That indicates, however, that a decision to take up equity in AI companies, whether offered voluntarily or simply expropriated with or without market-based consideration, isn’t straightforward. It needs to be deeply thought through before a government jumps into the messy process of picking and investing in the perceived AI winners.

Whether the Trump administration is capable of working its way through the complexities of the questions posed is doubtful.

If Trump is offered what could be very valuable slices of trillion-dollar companies, he will almost inevitably jump at the opportunity.

He is, as his entire career in business and politics and his recent misadventures in the Middle East show, highly transactional and opportunistic rather than strategic and policy-minded.

The prospect of seizing billions, perhaps trillions, of dollars of value – possibly for nothing – would be irresistible.

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