The Trump-Sanders plan to nationalize AI

“As far as economics is concerned, we have certain things that aren’t that far apart.”

—President Donald Trump on Bernie Sanders and proposals to take equity stakes in AI companies, June 2026.

Since bursting onto the policy scene, debate over artificial intelligence — apart from competition with China — has largely centered on regulation. Should government slow AI down? Ban it? License it? Impose guardrails?

That debate is already becoming obsolete. The question now is increasingly one of who owns AI — and the wealth it generates.

Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) recently proposed a 50 percent public ownership stake in major AI companies. The twist is Donald Trump’s sympathy for the same basic idea, which, to anyone paying attention, is not coming out of the blue.

When asked about his discussions with AI companies regarding federal equity stakes, Trump floated his desire for the public to share in the wealth created by the AI revolution:

[T]here’s so much money and it’s so big that there are concepts where pieces could be given to the American public where the American public essentially becomes a partner with … the companies.

The details remain unspecified, but there is reason to believe Trump is serious. His administration has already embraced federal ownership stakes in strategically favored firms, including Intel. Different rhetoric, perhaps, and different justifications involving supply chains and national competitiveness — but the destination increasingly resembles the Bernie Sanders vision.

The upshot is that we can forget about Trump’s much-vaunted deregulatory agenda where the frontier actually matters. Once Washington becomes military partner, subsidizer, regulator, customer, shareholder, and dispenser of political favors all at once, the distinction between public and private decision-making begins to disappear. Government participation in profits inevitably becomes government participation in direction — not just of individual firms, but of entire sectors. AI is proving even more vulnerable than other sectors in terms of a federal appetite for control.

Unfortunately, the AI sector is not merely accommodating these developments; it is helping to design them. The modern novelty is that progressives and socialists, Trump, and many AI companies are increasingly singing from the same hymnbook. OpenAI’s recent Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age blueprint, for example, promotes public wealth funds, workforce-transition programs, wage supports, portable benefits, and expansions of already sprawling government programs. In just 17 pages, OpenAI outlines an apparatus for redistributing AI-generated gains, ending with invitations for the public to add more ornaments to the tree.

For years, Universal Basic Income (UBI) advocates argued that automation would require new forms of redistribution, and the COVID era saw the emergence of direct and UBI-adjacent pilot projects. Today, the prospect of converting AI-generated wealth into a permanent stream of politically distributed benefits is proving irresistible. Even if redistribution shrinks the pie, it expands government’s role in allocating it.

“Mere” industrial policy was bad enough, equity stakes even worse. An AI welfare state would complete the transformation from capitalism to political management via a permanent, non-reformable administrative state.

The premise is remarkable: government must manage, direct, and redistribute wealth — not because AI will destroy prosperity, but because it may create too much.

Deprivation? Or abundance? The political response appears to be bigger government either way. That is what makes it especially troubling to see major technology firms themselves proposing vast new administrative structures to manage the transition.

AI will create immense wealth. The question is whether that wealth emerges through competitive enterprise and voluntary exchange — expanding prosperity, opportunity, and independence — or through a politically managed system in which government and favored firms jointly direct innovation and distribute the proceeds, expanding dependence. As America 250 approaches, the nation should prefer the former.

In my recent report, “Welcome to the Machine: How Schemes to Control AI are Progressive Tools to Control Society,” I called this dynamic “misalignment by design.” The greatest danger is not that AI becomes misaligned with humanity. It is that AI becomes aligned with political power.

The old fear was that artificial intelligence would take over society. The emerging reality is that government already has.

For more, see:

“Welcome to the Machine: How Schemes to Control AI Are Progressive Tools to Control Society,” Competitive Enterprise Institute

“Universal Basic Income and the Custodial Administrative State,” Competitive Enterprise Institute

“The most powerful monopoly isn’t a corporation: Introducing the Capitol Control Quotient,” Competitive Enterprise Institute