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Sen. Bernie Sanders on Monday announced he will soon introduce legislation that would give the American public “a direct ownership stake” in the largest artificial intelligence companies in the U.S. by establishing a sovereign wealth fund, which would ensure everyone benefits from the rapidly advancing technology.

Sanders (I-Vt.) wrote in a New York Times op-ed that his American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act would create the new fund by imposing a one-time, 50% tax on the stock of OpenAI, Anthropic, and other AI behemoths. The sovereign wealth fund, a government-owned investment vehicle, would both “give the public a direct role in determining the future of this technology” and “guarantee that the trillions of dollars potentially generated by AI are used to improve the lives of all of us — not simply to make the richest people in the world even richer.”

The senator emphasized that “this is not an original idea,” noting that scholars and even leading AI companies have proposed some version of a public wealth fund to broadly distribute AI-related gains. Sanders also observed that Norway and Alaska have........

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