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

June 23, 2026 — 12:14pm

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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. Democrats 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, a 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.’Donald Trump

“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 the technology has been built on the collective knowledge of generations, much of it collected without compensation........

© The Age