LAnd no one is accusing Bernie Sanders of ducking the big questions. Writing in the New York Times last week, the senator asked: “Will the future of humanity be decided by a handful of billionaires who, without democratic input, promoted and developed AI and stand even richer and more powerful than they are today?”
We fully agree that this is one of the most powerful questions facing global democracy today. Our book, Rewiring Democracy, examines the growing uses and implications of AI in democracies around the world and reaches the same conclusion: the most pressing danger posed by AI is the concentration of power, wealth, and control among technological oligarchs.
Still, we reached a different conclusion than Sanders on what to do about it.
The senator points to a once radical but increasingly popular solution: creating a US sovereign wealth fund that would take a 50% stake in AI companies like Anthropic, OpenAI and XAI. There are two arguments in favor of this. One: It would establish democratic control over AI companies, giving the government “its voting shares and equal representation on each company’s board to prevent decisions that hurt our citizens and push for policies that help them.” Two: It would return a large portion of the economic rewards of skyrocketing AI valuations to the public, ensuring that “the trillions of dollars generated by AI are used to improve the lives of all of us.”
We unreservedly appreciate both of these goals.
We wholeheartedly agree that there should be public influence on the development and use of AI, just as the government intervenes to ensure that automakers, drugmakers, airlines, and other industries balance profits with public safety and the public good. To achieve this, we commend the Senator for recognizing that the government has more levers to pull beyond regulatory promulgation.
We also agree that the obscene, risky hoarding among AI companies must be disrupted. As OpenAI and the Anthropic Race become the world’s latest trillion-dollar AI companies, we must recognize that — whether it’s a bubble or not — this staggering market capitalization represents a transfer of wealth. The flow of money goes from small businesses and real people using AI, and by extension, to the owners of these technology companies.
It also includes the world’s 86 AI billionaires “seeking to maximize their power and profits” with the aim of deciding “the fate of humanity … behind closed doors in Silicon Valley,” as Sanders put it.
Still, while we’re not entirely opposed to picking up AI company stocks or a US sovereign wealth fund, there are better ways to achieve Sanders’ stated goals.
Public ownership of these institutions entangles corporate profits and valuation with the public good. It can encourage government to destroy regulations, allow exploitation of workers and users, stifle competition, encourage AI adoption, and otherwise act on behalf of corporate interests, regardless of operational responsibility or use case validity.
After all, if Nvidia grows from its first $5tn valuation to the next $5tn, this segment of the sovereign wealth fund will double in value. Then, expect fund managers to support chip sales both overseas and domestically, as will the company’s private investors.
It is not an effective way to influence organizations to act in the public interest. In effect, it increases corporate influence over government.
We should be wary of this possibility because we have seen it before. The ownership of significant stakes in oil companies by the world’s largest Norwegian sovereign wealth fund does not appear to have steered those companies toward pro-environmental policies. Instead, the Norwegian government’s dependence on those companies has prevented them from taking climate action. Here in the U.S., public employee pension funds deserve the same criticism: the fiduciary duty to create wealth overrides any purpose of directing their corporate stock for the public good.
A better answer is to separate the two goals. Taxation is the standard way to share private rewards with the wider society. Senator Elizabeth Warren has proposed an excise tax on the energy use of data centers. Others have proposed an AI token tax, which has the same effect.
Given the goal of reshaping AI for the public good, we have proposed the AI Public Will. Governments, be it federal or state, envision establishing publicly developed and operated AI models run by public institutions under democratic control. Government should not eliminate corporate AI or seize it as public property, but instead provide a competitive baseline that private AI offerings must meet or exceed in order to win business — similar to the concept of a public interest in health.
The Swiss are following this approach. Apertus is a large language model built using Swiss public servants, Swiss university researchers, properly licensed training data, and pre-existing Swiss public supercomputing infrastructure powered by renewable energy.
While Apertus doesn’t seriously compete with the latest OpenAI and Anthropic models on performance metrics, it blows them out of the water in terms of transparency, sustainability, and compliance with EU regulations, including compliance with copyright. This is a new project, but it indicates how public companies can use competitive pressure to force corporate actors to behave responsibly.
Don’t confuse public AI with “sovereign AI,” the idea that each country should invest in domestic AI infrastructure. Sovereign AI is often used as a marketing pitch for large tech companies looking to sell to governments; It demands public investment without guaranteeing public control.
Sanders is a bold and ambitious political operator. Why is he pursuing a sovereign wealth fund strategy when he should be aware of these risks? Another argument he makes in his op-ed may be that the Trump administration and billionaire owners of AI are on board with the idea.
It’s good to take advantage of the rare moments of seeming unity across diverse political factions, but it’s good to ask why AI billionaires are open to this unusual intervention. The answer, of course, is that if every dollar of government equity is given away, they hope to get a return on favorable government policies to secure that new investment.
Energy taxation is a straightforward way for AI companies to pay for the social disruption of their technologies. Public AI represents a non-monetary mechanism through which governments can shape the development of AI, supplementing direct regulation of private actors more likely to influence corporate behavior in the public interest. We urge Sanders and other political leaders to consider them.
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Nathan E. Sanders is a data scientist with Harvard University’s Bergman Klein Center and co-author, with Bruce Schneier, of Rethinking Democracy: How AI is Transforming Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship. Bruce Schneier is a security technologist
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