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 could build giant fireworks for 242 million!
SpaceX is another flop. It’s main income is from NASA
For perspective SPCX is mostly (74%) a service company for Starlink.
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.
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.
Yeah that’s what I read here, acquisition not share purchase.
As someone who has never used AI, another thing that springs to mind; the possibility that under good governance and regulation, AI services might become more trusted and perform better.
I’m trying to find flaw with this proposal, given what’s in front of us with AI, as someone who doesn’t know a lot about using it but sees everyday the problems bad regulation and intention causes with it.
Well…
Very broadly speaking, yes, having a much more direct regulation of how you can use ‘AI’, and how you can ‘generate’ it, for lack of a better term…
Yeah. AI isn’t totally useless. It can do a lot of very neat and useful things.
But, if used improperly, it can literally destroy the world’s software systems.
Just in the last 24-48 hours, Meta put an AI in charge of its customer support for Instagram.
People figured out that you can just use a VPN to set your IP to the approximate location of any Instagram account, tell it ‘oh i lost my email, heres my new one, can you send me a password reset email?’… and it would just do it.
The AI got wired in to the backend of Instagram’s security systems… and then used them to bypass them, because it wss asked to, nicely.
You’d have to have actual experts, not in AI, but in software engineering, systems architecture, experienced full stack senior devs, make up like a council of mandatory safety practices, things that LLMs should never be allowed to be plugged in to.
The… original idea of like a decade ago, was that the people developing this … would do that, they’d self regulate.
Then they decided they’d rather be trillionaires.
And also, a whole lot of people are the boat you’re in, not understanding much about AI… but they’re also delusional narcissists who are highly susceptibls to being upsold by people they view as more successful than them.
So those people just hear ‘Use AI or be left behind!’ and then layoff half the company to afford some kind of not even half baked AI implementation… and the latest numbers are something like 90-95% of firms that adopted AI in the last 12 or 18 months saw 0 or negative overall productivity gain.
… because this shit is not actually magic.
So yeah, yeah, formal regulation, at a very direct snd engaged level… I mean like AI can easily do more monetary damage than a nuclear warhead going off in a major city, if used improperly, by dumb hairless monkeys that want an easy button instead of any actual work associated with running anything.
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.
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.
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.
They already are! The government signed exclusive military contracts with OpenAI to develop autonomous weapons. Half of these AI companies are being propped up with taxpayer dollars in the form of government contracts or subsidies, or the promise that there will be a taxpayer revenue stream coming their way in the near future.
That’s for technology, not for equity.
Are you new here? The government will absolutely compensate the companies when the bubble bursts.
Yes but not when it seizes half 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?
I forget how pro state people are on here sometimes. Is no one concerned what the fascist government will do with that stake?
The fascists currently own that stake anyway, what’s the difference?
I mean they own way too large of a stake but a big portion is mutual funds currently. If we just transfers the fascists stake to the government it’d be a wash to me
americans arent being honest with themselves about how bad the state of their nation is in.
But our amazing big brother is gonna take care of us all! They only want what’s best for billionaires! I mean Russia! Crap no best for America! That’s the word!
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.
You know they will agree and give everyone stakes exactly when bubble is about to pop
Public stake isn’t for profits (especially not short term capital gains), it’s about concentration & not getting controlled.
Controlling something worthless is pointless anyway.
And giving it away to everyone will score political points.
Wdym away to everyone?
You didn’t read the article, or you didn’t understand it.
The US Govt would not pay a cent for the shares of these companies.
It would simply seize them, half-nationalize them.
Its a half nationalization, not a half bailout.
ai doesn’t make money so this is a bailout for a piece of junk. the amount of people here that think this will work out is fuckin incredible.
Nothing in the legislation reads as a bailout, the government would unilaterally take 50% stake and the associated voting power. The American public is no worse off if it doesn’t turn a profit or gets liquidated.
The bailout would happen when the conservative vultures circle. “We can’t let them fail, that would devalue the American portfolio (never mind that this bailout is 2x any value that could ever be gained back)”
check my math:
0.5 x 0 = 0
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.
Tax the tokens
Every country
Every token
100% AI Tax
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.
Not the right move dawg
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.
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
Just ban running them on a loss. Maybe even ban running anything at a loss in order to curb competition, etc.
Kurt Vonnegut’s “Player piano” nailed it in 1952:
Automation makes factories more efficient, tax that efficiency and give it back to the displaced workers.
Of course, since then, we’ve been doing nothing but lowering corporate taxes…
Corporate taxes? Is that like military intelligence?
Getting there…
You know, when the government takes your money and gives it to corporations… corporate taxes!
I think that’s a traditional part of anti-monopoly laws, shame nobody enforces those anymore
Anti-monopoly laws have been problematic to enforce since their inception, because their targets are often as powerful as the government that might dare to regulate them.
