Most Americans now say the public should own half of the big AI companies, and nearly as many want Washington to have veto power over risky new models. That is not a fringe opinion anymore.
Sixty-nine percent of US adults support forcing AI companies to transfer 50% of their equity into a public sovereign wealth fund. CNBC reported the figure on July 12 from a Verasight survey of 1,690 adults, and the timing matters as much as the number. Eighteen months ago, this would have sounded like a fringe policy paper. It doesn't now.
The layoffs behind the number
You don't need a poll to tell you why. Tech firms accounted for nearly a third of all US layoffs in the first half of 2026, according to Challenger, Gray and Christmas, which tracked 139,156 tech job cuts through June, up 83% from the same period last year. Across the whole economy, Challenger found AI cited as the explicit reason in 101,743 layoff announcements this year, roughly 23% of every job cut the firm tracked. Four straight months now, AI has been the single most-cited reason companies give for cutting staff. That is new ground.
Behind the anxiety sits a specific forecast. Joseph Briggs, a Goldman Sachs economist, estimates that more than 9% of the US labor force, about 15 million workers, could be displaced over what he expects to be a roughly ten-year AI transition. In the most exposed industries, tech, management consulting, graphic design, Briggs figures AI is already shaving 10,000 to 15,000 jobs off monthly employment growth. His caveat matters too: spread over a decade, the hit to the unemployment rate in any single year should stay under a percentage point, and a modest 5% pickup in the pace of new job creation would be enough to reabsorb everyone AI displaces.
That's the theory, anyway. Voters don't appear to be waiting around to find out if that math works out.
Sanders already wrote the bill
This isn't hypothetical policy chatter. Senator Bernie Sanders introduced the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act in June, and the Associated Press reported that the bill would impose a one-time 50% stock tax on AI companies generating more than $200 million in annual AI revenue. The proceeds would go into a public fund worth roughly $7 trillion, managed by an independent commission confirmed by the Senate. Sanders says the fund could pay about $1,000 a year to each American while also supporting public services.
That is real money. The voting shares matter just as much. The commission overseeing the fund could use them to influence corporate decisions it judges harmful, which is a very different thing from a one-off tax receipt. Companies that run both AI and non-AI business lines would have to split them, so the public's stake attaches only to the AI side. No blending the books. That structural requirement alone would force a genuine reorganization at firms like Microsoft or Google, where AI revenue is tangled up with cloud, search, and productivity software.
Sanders is a democratic socialist, and Congress is Republican-controlled, so the bill isn't passing cleanly this session. Frankly, that isn't the most interesting part anymore. Fortune has reported that the Trump White House has floated its own version of public ownership tied to AI infrastructure, which means the idea has crossed the partisan line that usually kills proposals like this outright. That crossing matters.
The same Verasight survey found the appetite for intervention runs well past equity transfers. Eighty-one percent of respondents said the government should have the authority to block the release of a risky AI system before it ships. Eighty-nine percent want AI firms legally required to publish their safety-testing results. Verasight CEO Benjamin Leff put it plainly: the public sees an AI sovereign fund as a mechanism to redistribute gains from the industry back to society at large.
None of this is law yet. The mechanics of taking equity from Nvidia, OpenAI, Anthropic, or any other AI company would tangle up courts for years if Washington tried it. But cap tables get priced on expected outcomes, not just current statutes. A founder raising a Series C this year is now fundraising against a backdrop where 69% of the country wants half their company, and where a sitting senator has already written the bill to take it.
Also read: Starbucks is quietly building the software it used to buy from IBM and Microsoft, Zhipu's co-founder says open AI is safer just as its stock triples in a year, How to Evaluate AI Agents Before You Ship Them to Real Users
