69% of Americans support forcing AI firms to transfer 50% of their stock to a public sovereign wealth fund, a Verasight poll found, as tech layoffs surge and Senator Bernie Sanders proposes the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act.
A majority of Americans want AI companies to hand half their stock to a public sovereign wealth fund, a new survey shows.
The Verasight poll of 1,690 adults, conducted in June and published this month, found 69% support for forcing AI firms to transfer 50% of their equity to a fund that would distribute gains to the public.
"In the eyes of the public, AI sovereign funds are seen as a tool to distribute the gains from the AI industry back to broader society," Benjamin Leff, Verasight's chief executive, said.
The survey comes as Senator Bernie Sanders introduced the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act in June. The bill would give the public a 50% stake in the largest U.S. AI companies. "It would guarantee that the economic benefits generated by AI are used to improve the lives of all of us – not simply to make the richest people in the world even richer," Sanders said in a statement. "The future of AI and the fate of humanity must not be decided behind closed doors in Silicon Valley by billionaires seeking to maximize their power and profit."
Tech layoffs have risen sharply even as corporate profits climb, fueling public frustration. Goldman Sachs senior global economist Joseph Briggs estimates that more than 9% of the U.S. labor force, or roughly 15 million workers, could lose their jobs over a 10-year AI transition period. The bank described the potential dislocation as "the type of automation and reallocation shock that we saw in the late '90s and early 2000s and in other periods of significant technological change." Briggs expects those losses to be temporary, as AI will eventually create new jobs.
Sovereign wealth funds can play multiple roles in AI. They can fund capital-intensive infrastructure, take equity stakes in AI companies, and capture a share of AI-driven economic gains for the public treasury, according to research firm Windfall Trust. The funds also face a tension between financial returns and national strategy. "There is also a tension between the financial mandate (maximize returns for citizens) and the strategic mandate (build national AI capacity, maintain influence over frontier systems), since these objectives can conflict when the best financial investment is a foreign AI company rather than a domestic one," Windfall Trust said.
The poll's finding that 69% of Americans support a forced transfer of AI equity suggests the idea has broad political appeal. The Sanders bill would create a fund modeled on Alaska's Permanent Fund, which distributes oil revenue to residents. AI sovereign wealth funds would operate differently, taking equity stakes in companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google rather than collecting resource royalties.
Windfall Trust noted that sovereign wealth funds could also lead development of AI at a national level by funding capital-intensive AI infrastructure. That puts them in competition with private capital markets and tech companies that already spend heavily on data centers and chips. The tension between financial and strategic mandates becomes acute when the best investment opportunity is a foreign AI company rather than a domestic one.
The survey was conducted before the Sanders bill was introduced, so the 69% figure reflects public sentiment independent of the specific legislative proposal. Verasight did not ask respondents about the trade-offs involved in a sovereign wealth fund, such as potential government control over AI development or the risk of political interference in investment decisions.
Goldman Sachs' estimate that 15 million workers could lose jobs over a decade frames the scale of the disruption. The bank's report said the transition would resemble the late-1990s and early-2000s automation shock, which eliminated manufacturing jobs but eventually created new roles in technology and services. Briggs expects a similar pattern with AI, though the timeline and sectors affected remain uncertain.
Tech layoffs in 2024 and 2025 have already exceeded 200,000, according to industry tracking data, with companies like Google, Microsoft, and Meta cutting staff while increasing AI spending. The disconnect between rising profits and falling employment has driven the public's appetite for a mechanism that redistributes AI gains.
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