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Who would vote for it other than Sanders?
Dems are as deep in the tank for the AI companies as any Republican.
It’s a bad idea anyhow. We can’t afford the water and hazard of all the electricity use. Plus, it’s going to all loose money for another 10 years.
Almost everyone in this thread seems to be assuming the US would pay for half the shares/equity of these companies.
That is not what is being proposed.
What is being proposed is that the US Govt simply seize half the shares/equity/board voting powers in these companies, without paying a cent for them.
It is a half-nationalization.
Not a half-bailout.
EDIT
I go into more detail and explain in this comment in this same thread:
Good clarification. I’m convinced we will end up bailing them out anyway. We should nationalize and operate as a public good if generative AI is that important to society.
I genuienly struggle to think of a kind of economic thing that better qualifies as a public utility.
Completely agree that this kind of technology, with such broad and immense ongoing, as well as potential implications, cannot be allowed to be directed by the whims of wealthy capitalist conmen rent seekers.
Nationalization doesn’t change the fact that for example OpenAI plans to burn $100B in 2026 without any profit so taxpayers will inherit $50B debt just from 2026. Moreover it doesn’t stop those companies for raising more debt from for example corporate bonds emission just by saying 50% of their capital is government owned. That would allow them to literally raise trillions.
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2025/12/30/openais-cash-burn-will-be-one-of-the-big-bubble-questions-of-2026
https://archive.ph/8Ej9zIf OpenAI fails, and the government owns half of it…
The assets and power the government acquired for no monetary cost simply becomes zero.
The other part of simply seizing half the shares is that the government (presumably a number of ministers/officials in charge of the new sovereign wealth fund) now has half the voting power of the entire board.
That is a pretty direct way to wield influence as to the decisions the company can make, how the CEO can behave.
You want maybe the accounting to actually deprecate the GPUs they have or lease over a realistic timeframe, instead of a totally bullshit one?
Half of your shareholders now demand this.
C Suite refuse to comply?
Begin the process of firing them.
OpenAI don’t own any GPU, they lease it from Microsoft or from Oracle. Oracle bought GPU by emitting billions of dollars of corporate bonds. OpenAI only owns AI models that they copy to datacenters. Same is with Anthropics. They own no datacenter or GPU they just lease it from other parties.
Bernie Sanders is putting taxpayers responsible for overspending on datacenters and make datacenters bailout. He should propose that all models should be open to public if they are used by government organizations so it can be independently audited by researchers. That would prevent those companies to cause harm to people.
xAI is now (or will very soon be) part of SpaceX.
They physically own massive ‘Colossus’ datacenters with tons of GPUs.
As to leasing vs owning, I already addressed that.
If you are the government and you are half of the shareholders, you can pressure your own AI company, or the companies from whom your AI company leases GPUs from to be more honest and transparent regarding accounting methodologies.
Bernie is not proposing that any taxpayer money be put toward this at all.
The only actual expense here would be the minute cost of simply hiring some people to run and manage the sovereign wealth fund. Miniscule in comparison to the potential equity value of $$$s being managed. Think something like the administrative cost of running say, the SEC or FTC, in comparison to the amount of money moving around that they can affect.
He is proposing the government simply half nationalize these companies, as Trump not long ago did with TikTok.
If the government is half of every US based AI company’s board, they can also very effectively pressure them to make the models open source.
Not sure if you don’t understand the concept of nationalization, but basically, thats when the government looks at something and says ‘i own this now, because I say so’.
Theres no payment. Its… why I use the word ‘seize’.
Same way Marx argued that workers should ‘seize’ the means of production: Just take them.
xAI is now (or will very soon be) part of SpaceX
xAI bought twitter in '25, and then Space-X bought xAI in Feb of this year. So it’s already done, and twitter is a bonus!
You’re right!
I was mixing up the acquisition/merger and IPO timelines.
SpaceX is another flop. It’s main income is from NASA. $30B in long term debt, they estimate $1.75T valuation only year they showed any profit was in 2024 and it was $242M. Just to compare the private company that literally landed on moon Firefly Aerospace is worth $7B valuation debuted last year. -38% on NASDAQ. I’m not from US you’re living in some bad dream right now. Wake up people because they are fucking you in the ass and you’re clapping.
I agree that SpaceX is a fiscal shitshow.
Would you rather own half of it for no cost?
Or own none of it for no cost?
If you own half of it for no cost, you have a substantial ability to … tell it what to do, with its people, its assets, its stuff, its technology.
If you own none of it for no cost, you do not have this ability.
In both scenarios, if the stock value goes to zero, you lose nothing, because you paid nothing.
Again, you seem to be struggling with the concept of nationalization.
The government just takes stuff over, because it says so, and it is the government.
No one is compensated, no one is paid.
In the US, cops can do this thing called asset seizure.
You get pulled over for a dead taillight.
You own a carwash and you’re on your way to deposit the month’s excess cash into the business account at your bank.
Cop decides you smell like marijuana, finds your cash and your well kept accounting records.
Doesn’t matter, that might be drug money, cops take the money.
Imagine that, but with stocks instead.
But is it critical infrastructure ?
Country should own roads, hospitals, power plants, water, lend land for farmers instead of Bill Gates owning 1 / 4000 of your farm land, communal housing, things that serve people so country should make sure everyone have access to it. Not what serve corporations and rich and push money there. Probably half of your 401k money are already there if you follow the dots.
It would be better to nationalize or buy office buildings from corporations and use this money. Tax their assets from tax havens. Tax them until instead of crying they start begging. Now your country are treating those companies like little babies.
You have different mindset, that’s what I’m trying to explain.
You should have free healthcare and free education like in Europe. Cheap transportation across country in trains, bike lanes. Cheap food and houses. Be happy. Why you can’t travel by train from New York to Los Angeles ? Russia that everyone laughs from and hates because their politicians are idiots, they can travel from Moscow to Vladivostok.
Instead of that you’re launching farts towards moon and chasing demons in computers.
People over power.
I could build giant fireworks for 242 million!
US Govt simply seize half the shares/equity/board voting powers in these companies, without paying a cent for them.
they still have half the liability.
What liability?
What does that even mean?
If I own a stock, a share of a company… what does that make me liable for, just owning the stock?
Do you think that like, if I own a stock, and the company gets sued or something… I personally have to help the company pay out the damages the company is liable for?
No that’s not how stocks or the law works.
If the company’s stock decreases in value after people hear about it having to pay out from a court case, then yeah the stock has less value now… but the government seized the stock, it got it for $0 dollars.
So there’s no net loss.
True but most of the value of these LLMs comes from ingesting data produced by the public, with a healthy amount of copyrighted data.
Would you be in favour of class action lawsuits to compensate for the intellectual theft instead?
No, not instead.
In addition to, sure.
Class action lawsuits as a primary counter action to damages?
… why not just … stop the damages from happening?
If you have 50% of the shares, you have a controlling interest on the board.
You can significantly just tell the company what to do, what policies to have.
Going through through the courts to compensate the damage after the fact is massively more expensive and time consuming… its hitting someone with your car and they paying their medical bill 2 years later.
Why not just not hit them with the car?
Yeah that’s my point, actually.
Does this mean we’ll all be bag holders when the AI bubble bursts?
We are already holding the bag.
They are “too big to fail”
It is the de way
They’re very much not. They have high valuations, but very few employees. Very different to the banks (where the public would lose money) and the car firms (who employed large numbers of workers)
Guess where the publics money is invested?
Pensions and other investments, yes.
Not current accounts which was what was at risk in 2008. When the bank goes bust you don’t just lose money. You become unable to do anything financial, like get paid.
We didn’t just bail the banks in 2008.
Now do the US Auto Makers.
Who are still making terrible decisions
Read the thread. Already did that.
How? The government doesn’t plan to compensate the companies.
The point being, if the public owns half of the company but the company is failing, now the public has acquired 50% liability of a dying business.
Like others said though, I’m sure taxpayers will be on the hook either way.
Do these companies have liabilities?
50% might have been a fair cut if they actually asked for permission up front,but they didn’t. Everything made by AI is fruit if the poison tree and should be something equal to public domain.
When I found out what it meant when other countries have sovereign wealth funds…
I have no idea how most people in America keep convincing themselves they’ve somehow got a good deal.
It’s mostly oil countries that have a sovereign wealth fund and it comes out of the oil money. Norway, Saudi Arabia. Idea being that oil is a limited resource with a lot of value and the proceeds should be used to ensure everyone’s future.
Of course the US IS an oil country…
50% seems very low. They created these companies by scraping and pirating information.
50% means that they just need to fool a few people to get what they want. Imo it should be more like 90% public with a requirement that all services must be provided for free.
How about a 50% stake in all companies valued over 5 billionaire dollars.
Boom.
I don’t know how you divide it up amongst countries but I like where your head is.
Pretty horseshit to act like they trained AI on only American data so only Americans should benefit.
What about the literal entire rest of the world? They get nothing right?
Just another example of America exploiting the world for their own benefit. Even the good ones are so corrupted by their system that they do it without realizing.
Yeah, it has the same vibe as:
“Bernie Sanders proposes bill to give US-Americans 50% stake in military contractors.”
What are you suggesting should have been done here?
If this ever passed, I bet we’d see a pretty quick devaluation in these things.
I’m okay with that. The bubble is going to burst eventually.
Wouldn’t this make everyone interested in the bad business practices that would increase the profits?
It makes sure that the public benefits from mass automation.
Government. We are not the government.
https://cdn.mises.org/anatomy-of-the-state.pdf
It’s a very short book. And it’s covered pretty convincingly in the first chapter no less.
Yes but stocks go up when AI gets more market power, exploits more privacy, sells more data to vested interests. The public would then have an interest in all that. Or at least this interest would compete with privacy interests. It may make it harder to push the company to do something, no?
More likely in would just exarcerbate the financial instability of the AI industry and hasten its downfall, which I’m all for
Or delay it. How would the government having 50% stake in an industry make it less stable? Now the government will form policy around protecting its stake. This will delay a collapse that we should want to happen sooner than later, and ideally be as divested from as possible.
What happens when they go bust?
Maybe we all get to enjoy a massive tax write off like a big business
But the government will actually own it, not you and me. So the government will write of its taxes to itself?
I have no idea lol
Not the right move dawg
50% too low.
It would be a good idea if the entirety of the current industry for it wasn’t built entirely on smoke and mirrors type promises.
The general idea (so far as I can parse) is that if these companies are expecting a government bailout when it all goes south, then the tax payers who would be bailing them out should get paid back. But in practice, what will happen is we’ll be saddled with the debt and these companies will weasel out of it.
The fact is I don’t want to own a stake in any of these companies. I would rather they make it illegal for these companies to ask for a bailout from the government and close loopholes they will use to file for bankruptcy.
If they’re going to fail the government should buy their assets (data centers, infrastructure, etc) if the people agree that’s okay. Instead of what will likely happen (the companies left standing when it all goes under will buy up all the assets dirt cheap).
Idk I support bankruptcy for them, but I think it’s valuable to give mutual funds and pensions priority in restitution. Venture capital got themselves into this mess through irresponsible investment.
The biggest flaw, aside from it having to succeed in our corporate owned Congress, is that it would require these companies to actually make money, and based on the technology we have today, that seems unlikely to happen anytime in the next decade. At least not without some major technological breakthrough. But it’s better than nothing I suppose.
