BERNIE WANTS THE GOVERNMENT TO OWN HALF OF OPENAI — THE BILL THAT WOULD FORCE AI COMPANIES TO HAND OVER THEIR STOCK Senator Bernie Sanders introduced the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act this week, a bill that would impose a one time 50 percent tax on the stock of frontier AI companies and transfer those shares into a federally managed public fund. The companies in the crosshairs are OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI. Notably absent are existing publicly traded tech giants like Google and Meta, whose shareholders already represent a broader ownership base. The mechanism is worth understanding. This would not be a cash tax. It would be a stock seizure. The government would receive voting shares and equal board representation at each targeted company, giving federal regulators the power to block corporate decisions deemed contrary to the public interest. Sanders argues the case on straightforward grounds: AI systems were trained on text, code, and creative work produced by millions of people who never consented and will never see a dollar of profit. The bill has essentially no chance of passing in the current Congress. Sanders knows that. But the political moment around it is unusual. Both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are now publicly arguing that the government should own a stake in the most valuable private technology companies in history. They are arriving at the same destination by entirely different roads. That convergence is not something the AI industry can afford to ignore. Keywords: Bernie Sanders AI bill, AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, OpenAI nationalization, frontier AI regulation