Senator Bernie Sanders formally introduced an AI sovereign wealth fund bill in the Senate on 1 June 2026, entering the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act into the Congressional Record (Vol. 172, No. 92) on that date.
The Vermont independent had previewed the legislation in a New York Times op-ed, promising to give Americans a ‘direct ownership stake’ in the country’s largest AI companies through a one-time 50 percent tax on company stock, with the proceeds flowing into a new sovereign fund. The government would then use its ‘voting shares and equal representation on each company’s board’ to block decisions and policies it deems harmful.
The AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Proposal
Sanders frames the bill as a corrective to an industry ‘dictated by a handful of Big Tech oligarchs,’ citing calls for direct public payments from academics and the leaders of OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI. The legislation would, in his words, ‘give the public a direct role in determining the future’ of artificial intelligence.
To justify the model, Sanders points to Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global and the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation. Both are funded by oil and gas revenue, a source Sanders has consistently opposed. The Alaska fund held $86.4 billion in assets as of 30 June 2025, according to the corporation’s own records, which supersede the rounder $86 billion figure cited in some summaries. The fund was ranked the top-performing sovereign wealth fund over both the trailing five- and ten-year periods in RVK’s 2025 Survey of US Sovereign Wealth Funds.
What the Alaska and Norway Models Actually Show
The Alaska model does provide direct annual payments to residents who have lived in the state for at least 12 months, a mechanism established by constitutional amendment in 1976. However, the APFC 2025 Annual Report records that more than 60 percent of Alaska’s state budget is now reliant on the Permanent Fund, with trustees pressing for consolidated accounts and stronger constitutional protections to preserve it for future generations.
Norway’s fund, by contrast, caps annual government withdrawals at 3 percent and does not distribute payments directly to citizens. Both funds are financed by the extraction of natural resources, not by confiscating equity in private companies.
The comparison to oligarchic wealth funds is one Sanders may not have intended to invite. Sovereign funds have been used by Russia to finance the war in Ukraine, by Iran to channel money to designated terrorist organisations, and by Saudi Arabia in ways that a 2024 Human Rights Watch report linked to human rights abuses. An American fund with board-level veto powers over the country’s largest technology companies would be a different instrument, but the structural risks of a large, politically directed pool of capital are not theoretical.
Trump’s Parallel Sovereign Fund Push
Sanders is not the only one pursuing the idea. President Donald Trump issued an executive order in February 2025 directing the Secretary of the Treasury, the Secretary of Commerce, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, and the Assistant to the President for Economic Policy to develop a plan for a US sovereign wealth fund within 90 days. The White House order states the fund would ‘promote fiscal sustainability, lessen the burden of taxes on American families and small businesses, establish economic security for future generations, and promote United States economic and strategic leadership internationally.’ No plan has yet been published.
In the House, Representative Morgan McGarvey has separately introduced H.R.3116, the American Sovereign Wealth Fund Exploration Act, in the 119th Congress. The bill carries the status ‘Introduced’ and is distinct from Sanders’ Senate legislation.
The Risks of Slowing a Technology That Is Already Spreading
Sanders’ broader argument that AI benefits accrue only to the wealthy is complicated by data already in circulation. Average 401(k) balances were up 11 percent through the first quarter of 2026 compared with the prior year, according to a Fidelity Investments retirement report, reflecting in part gains in technology stocks held across millions of ordinary retirement accounts.
The social applications are accumulating too. AI diagnostic tools can identify breast cancer earlier and with greater accuracy. Bilingual conversational agents have shown measurable improvements in young students’ language acquisition. Subjecting each of these to government approval, as the bill’s board-veto mechanism would require, creates obvious delays in deployment.
Whether or not the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act advances beyond introduction, the appetite among legislators on both sides for structured government oversight of the technology industry appears to be growing. The more immediate question is whether Trump’s own sovereign fund plan, now overdue, emerges in a form that either overlaps with or directly challenges what Sanders has put on the table.
