What AI nationalization could really look like

Senator Bernie Sanders wants the American public to own half of the country’s largest AI companies. The senator said this week that he will soon introduce the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, which would create a public fund through a onetime 50% tax on the stock of major artificial intelligence companies. The public, in his telling, would get voting shares, board representation, and eventually a claim on the trillions of dollars that AI may generate. While that might sound, at first, like another sweeping and unlikely bill from the Vermont Independent, its timing is interesting: A day later, President Donald Trump signed an executive order creating a 30-day federal review process for advanced AI models before public release. The order is narrower than what some AI hawks have called for, and Sanders has already criticized its voluntary structure. But together, the two developments suggest that Washington is beginning to treat AI less like another software business and more like a strategic industry whose ownership, access, safety, and profits may be too important to leave entirely to private companies. To be clear, a literal federal takeover of OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google DeepMind remains highly unlikely, at least outside some extraordinary crisis. But a softer version of nationalization—through prerelease review, procurement conditions, national-security contracting—is becoming easier to imagine. Nationalization has layers “There are different degrees of nationalization,” says Samuel Hammond, acting director of AI policy and chief economist at the center-right Foundation for American Innovation. The bluntest version, he says, is outright government ownership: “where you literally buy the company.” That seems implausible to him, partly because the leading AI companies are now so expensive, and partly because the government would likely damage the very thing it was trying to control. Sanders’s proposal raises a narrower question: Should the public share in the