3 min read
Here is a number the AI industry would pay good money to bury. In a new national survey, 69% of Americans said they would back forcing the biggest AI companies to hand half their stock to a public wealth fund. They were not asked about a gentle tax bump or a stern new regulation; they were asked whether the state should seize half of these companies outright and share it around. And once you clock who is being fired to pay for the boom, the shock is not that the figure is 69%, it is that a third of the country still said no.
What the poll actually asked
The research firm Verasight put it to 1,690 adults. The pitch was a Norway-style sovereign wealth fund, except you swap the North Sea oil for a slab of the AI giants, with the profits flowing back to the public that keeps being told this technology is “for all of humanity”. Support barely flinched even when the idea was chained to a divisive politician: tie the fund directly to Senator Bernie Sanders and backing only slips to 64%. In an era where Americans cannot agree on the correct way to boil an egg, two-thirds agreeing on anything should be lighting up alarms in a very expensive boardroom somewhere.
The legislation nobody expected to matter
Sanders introduced the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act last month, reckoning the vehicle could eventually throw off around $7 trillion. Filed in a vacuum, it reads as a stunt. Filed against a backdrop where tech accounted for roughly a third of all US layoffs in the first half of 2026, it reads instead as the early political pricing-in of a story the industry is desperate not to say out loud: the productivity gains are real, and they are being hoovered up almost entirely by the handful of people who own the equity, while the workers who used to do the job get a severance email and a LinkedIn post about “resilience”.
That is the actual engine under this poll, and it is not envy or economic illiteracy, whatever the think-tank crowd will be insisting on cable news by Thursday. It is a perfectly rational read of where the money is going. Sell a technology as a civilisational gift to mankind, let mankind watch the gift land in roughly nine cap tables, and mankind will, reasonably enough, start asking where its f*cking half is.
It almost certainly will not happen. Yet.
Prising half of Nvidia out of private hands is not surviving this Congress, and the industry’s lobbyists will smother the idea with the tender devotion of men whose second homes depend on it. But polls like this are how the Overton window gets dragged across the floor. Ideas travel from unthinkable to inevitable, and the smart money reads the survey data years before the law ever catches up. In fairness to the AI bosses, they did spend a decade promising this thing would benefit everyone. A large majority of the country has simply decided to take them at their word and turn up to collect.
The AI tool stack actually worth paying for
One email a week. The tools, models and moves that matter, minus the hype and the horseshit filter set to maximum. Free.
Did you know: Norway’s real sovereign wealth fund, built on North Sea oil, is now worth well over a trillion dollars and owns roughly 1.5% of every listed company on the planet. It makes each of its citizens a millionaire on paper without a single one of them having to launch a startup or “hustle”. The model in this poll is not science fiction, it is simply pointed at silicon instead of crude.