alt.hn

6/3/2026 at 4:58:39 PM

The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies

 https://www.sanders.senate.gov/op-eds/the-public-should-own-half-of-the-big-a-i-companies/

by droidjj

6/3/2026 at 5:33:49 PM

> A.I. is built on our collective intelligence: our books, songs, artwork, journalism, computer code, scientific research, videos, conversations, images and ideas spanning generations

I know many here would scoff at nationalizing a private company, but AI is a usurpation of human knowledge and quite literally at times. (Every AI company was embroiled in copyright lawsuits and lord knows what Qwen et al are up to.)

In turn, everyone knows labor displacement is coming. My bet is the next recession will end up being brutal for this reason. To me, labor displacement and the social consequences are a potentially *catastrophic* negative externality. Should not there be a tax to offset the "frictional" unemployment? What happens when people lose a high skill job and will no longer be able to afford their mortgage?

Also, why are people always talking about AI as if its an angel or satan? The degree to which we're doomed is an open question, much like a tornado... so why aren't we thinking about taxes on AI like a tornado insurance fund?

by fny

6/3/2026 at 7:51:24 PM

> Should not there be a tax to offset the "frictional" unemployment?

Absolutely not. That's like taxing shovels because people were digging with their hands. The result is just more people having to dig with their hands, the fact that 7/8ths of people who now dig with their hands will starve because shovels have been introduced is a choice that we are making. We are choosing not to feed them.

Creating an unnecessary pretense so that they can suffer before they are fed is psychotic. Pay them to go to school or to show up to healthcare appointments, not to do work that can be automated away.

by pessimizer

6/4/2026 at 2:25:06 PM

> the fact that 7/8ths of people who now dig with their hands will starve because shovels have been introduced is a choice that we are making. We are choosing not to feed them

The unfortunate truth of western economic history is that capital does not willingly share its profits unless forced to (by government or labor).

The core point here is about power.

Assuming AI takes off and automates large sections of the economy, who gets to have control over those entities?

It seems a bit premature to identify the current major AI labs as inevitably being the ones to benefit.

But I am sympathetic to the idea that having the public as a (mostly) silent partner, both in profits and control, is prudent.

Where it gets dangerous is how "the public's" equity share is represented and by whom.

F.ex. I'd be vociferously opposed to the current kleptomaniacal US administration being able to wield 50% control

by ethbr1

6/3/2026 at 5:52:48 PM

> In turn, everyone knows labor displacement is coming

What % of Americans would agree to that. 10%?

I agree for those of us in the field, we are a lot more confident. But I dont think my retired parents have any idea what AI is or have ever touched anything more complicated than Alexia.

by brianwawok

6/3/2026 at 6:22:02 PM

That's, in large part, because tech is the field most likely to face labor disruption. Most jobs in the US are service, labor, and other such fields where LLMs will have relatively little impact.

Tech will also probably come under attack from two directions. It's not only from labor replacement, but also from a decrease in the value of tech. Right now competition in tech is limited by the relatively large barrier to entry to writing even simple programs. As that barrier disappears, the baseline value of tech will likely decline sharply.

by somenameforme

6/3/2026 at 6:32:09 PM

If employment as a whole is impacted 10%, those people end up seeking work elsewhere, and driving down wages there. It's impossible for this not to effect everyone.

by mikewarot

6/3/2026 at 7:07:26 PM

The impacts of AI amplify the system we live in. We live in a society that is quite happy to let people starve on the street and die to protect home values. We're bouldering towards minting trillionaires at the same time as people are struggling to afford rent and having enough food to eat where they're one bad event from being homeless.

I agree that labor displacement (and wage suppression) is in fact the only AI product. IN a just society, automation (more generally than AI) would allow people to work less. But we all know that it just means further wealth concentration and inequality.

And as material conditions worsen, society will increasingly rip itself apart. Populism will lead people to blame various out-groups for their woes because there'll be no opposition to it. It's why in the year of our Lord 2026, we have concentration camps again. Some call that term hyperbolic given the association with the HOlocaust. These people don't know history. Concentration camps were originally deportation camps [1].

I keep bringing up municipal broadband as an example of how people who hate "communism" both like their output and it's always better than national ISPs. And you know who else believes in public ownership? The US Department of Defense [2].

[1]: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/deportatio...

[2]: https://investorplace.com/dailylive/2026/06/the-pentagon-is-...

by jmyeet

6/3/2026 at 5:54:01 PM

I would rather we have an alternative where you can buy Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceX, etc stock but it has a few strict requirements:

* Investors are committing to keeping their money over a 10 year period, and you pay them dividends

* At the end of the 10 years you can withdraw it all, or keep your stock but withdraw the dividends, or keep your stock and reinvest the dividends for the next 10 years.

* Companies cannot be on any other type of "stock market"

* Companies need to be identified as producing something of significant value, like SpaceX's rockets would qualify.

* It can be part of anyone's 401k since these companies would be scrutinized.

Ideally a social media only company would NEVER qualify. I think the stock market is too happy to buy and sell, when some of these companies are a long term investment that has slowly paid off in ways most people cannot fathom or comprehend including healthcare discoveries.

by giancarlostoro

6/3/2026 at 8:11:22 PM

To buy stocks you need savings. 24% of Americans don't have any. Your scheme wouldn't benefit them. Or am I misreading it?

by yread

6/3/2026 at 10:42:13 PM

I wouldn't block any 401k plans from purchasing these stocks which would open those up to those safer dividend returns. The maintenance cost would be drastically lowered too since you're not buying and selling these so frequently.

by giancarlostoro

6/3/2026 at 8:42:28 PM

How is this not just a "rich gets richer" scenario? What of the majority of the population that don't have excess funds to invest?

The funny thing about AI is that the LLMs were trained by stomping on private property rights, being the intellectual rights holders of songs, books, movies, etc plus the troves of user-generated content, something for which they see no benefit.

Why are private property rights so important for AI companies but the private property rights of the training data aren't important at all?

I can tell you why: people on HN aren't authors or musicians. They are however software engineers who see themselves as profiting from the AI bubble.

Put another way: it's not that they care about private property rights. They simply think they can get rich enough so the problems won't apply to them.

by jmyeet

6/3/2026 at 5:38:22 PM

You can tax something without owning it. It is the owning part that bothers me. It implies that the government is going to shovel ridiculous amounts of money into these things and when the bubble finally pops We The People get nothing out of it.

by fhdkweig

6/3/2026 at 6:15:49 PM

I think you've misunderstood the proposal. The government levies a tax in the form of shares, not cash. It doesn't pay for the shares.

FTA: "It would create a sovereign wealth fund through a one-time 50 percent tax — not on the profits of OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI and other companies, but paid with something far more valuable than that: the stock."

by triceratops

6/3/2026 at 6:30:51 PM

That seems like it would be pushing pretty hard against the Takings clause. Federal wealth taxes in general are rather precarious in the US because the 16th amendment allows taxing income, not assets.

by AnthonyMouse

6/3/2026 at 6:57:36 PM

Strictly speaking, that's not accurate.

Article 1, Section 8 has the general taxation clause:

> The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;

but Section 9 has the apportionment clause:

> No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or enumeration herein before directed to be taken.

The term "direct tax" isn't fully explained, but it's generally been held that taxes on property (including wealth) would classify as a direct tax. Congress imposed an income tax, but SCOTUS said in Pollock v Farmer's Loan & Trust Co that a tax on rental income is effectively a property tax, and so must be apportioned.

The 16th Amendment was enacted specifically to overrule the Pollock decision, and allowed for income taxes to not have to be apportioned. In many respects, it's probably unnecessary because even without it, it's probably fairly likely that Pollock would have been overruled as just being bonkers reasoning anyways.

by jcranmer

6/4/2026 at 8:20:33 AM

I'm not sure which part you're calling inaccurate. The 16th amendment:

> The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.

Allows taxes on incomes (but not wealth) without apportionment.

According to your own post:

> it's generally been held that taxes on property (including wealth) would classify as a direct tax.

Implying that unlike income under the 16th amendment, a federal tax on wealth would have to be apportioned. But apportionment isn't something people are likely to accept in that context because then you can't put the screws to people in New York or Texas without extracting the same amount per capita from the people in New Mexico or Arkansas.

> In many respects, it's probably unnecessary because even without it, it's probably fairly likely that Pollock would have been overruled as just being bonkers reasoning anyways.

Unclear how that reasoning could be bonkers without Wickard v. Filburn being even worse, since the logic is pretty similar. The 16th amendment itself had exactly the result apportionment was intended to prevent, i.e. states with structural political advantages (swing states, lower population states with more US Senators per capita) quickly set up massive federal transfers to themselves at the expense of other states.

by AnthonyMouse

6/3/2026 at 6:31:17 PM

How are property taxes legal?

by triceratops

6/3/2026 at 6:31:52 PM

There is no federal property tax, and even state property taxes are collected in dollars rather than shares of ownership and as a small recurring percentage rather than a one-time taking of what amounts to a controlling interest.

by AnthonyMouse

6/3/2026 at 6:35:36 PM

Thanks for the clarification.

by triceratops

6/3/2026 at 5:42:16 PM

That sounds like a brilliant idea if you're a board member of one of these companies.

by dylan604

6/3/2026 at 5:55:19 PM

Who said anything about the government shoveling in money?

by vrganj

6/3/2026 at 6:02:50 PM

Usually to "own" something requires to spend money to get it.

by fhdkweig

6/3/2026 at 6:06:04 PM

The government gets half my paycheck without buying it from me.

by triceratops

6/3/2026 at 6:19:59 PM

Really? Poor Elon must be going bankrupt any time now, seeing how much of Tesla and SpaceX he owns.

by grim_io

6/3/2026 at 7:41:08 PM

... or force.

by vrganj

6/3/2026 at 5:54:45 PM

Wait, is the idea to buy that 50%?

by exe34

6/3/2026 at 5:56:57 PM

I don't know what their plan is, but that is one way to "own half". I'm really hoping that isn't their plan, but this administration seems to love shoveling tax money to people who don't deserve it.

by fhdkweig

6/3/2026 at 7:06:02 PM

> I don't know what their plan

The plan Bernie Sanders is proposing is clearly stated in TFA, which is to take 50% of shares as a one-time tax, not as a purchase.

by wasabi991011

6/3/2026 at 7:04:45 PM

No, it isn't, it's to take 50% as a tax, as stated in TFA.

by wasabi991011

6/3/2026 at 7:14:09 PM

Yeah that's more sensible.

by exe34

6/3/2026 at 5:45:21 PM

Taxing X% ownership means you get X%. You don't pay for it. So if the bubble pops, you still get X% ownership. To your point, it may be smarter to tax the IPO valuation and buy more later.

by fny

6/3/2026 at 5:51:34 PM

I'm mostly commenting on the story a few days ago regarding having index funds change their rules to automatically purchase shares in the impending IPOs so that passive investors would end up buying shares without their direct knowledge. It struck me as a way for executives to cash out of what they know is a bubble. A lot of people in that thread didn't seem to have any issue with that.

by fhdkweig

6/3/2026 at 5:44:52 PM

Labor displacement is always coming. Every new technology eliminates some old occupations and creates new ones. LLMs aren't unique in that regard. We should have a safety net to support and retrain displaced workers regardless of the technology.

And let's please not have any lazy, low-effort replies claiming that AI will somehow magically eliminate all jobs for humans.

by nradov

6/3/2026 at 5:55:14 PM

What are the jobs AI is creating, specifically?

> And let's please not have any lazy, low-effort replies claiming that AI will somehow magically eliminate all jobs for humans.

I don't think AI actually capable of doing so, but AI companies need to stop bragging about wanting to do this and making it their goal if you don't want people to keep bringing it up.

by pesus

6/3/2026 at 6:54:01 PM

AI accelerates the entire white collar economy and makes it more efficient. It has and will continue to result in large job gains for blue collar and service workers. The people getting rich off AI have to spend their money somewhere.

by metalspot

6/3/2026 at 6:57:26 PM

> It has and will continue to result in large job gains for blue collar and service workers.

Source? Specifics? This doesn't even sound plausible at face value. Even if it is somehow true, higher paying white collar jobs being replaced with service jobs that pay far less and have way worse conditions is not a positive or even a neutral outcome.

> The people getting rich off AI have to spend their money somewhere.

The amount of wealth hoarding already going on says otherwise. Buying yachts and islands does not magically offset millions of jobs being lost.

by pesus

6/3/2026 at 6:59:08 PM

> The people getting rich off AI have to spend their money somewhere.

That's demonstrably false.

If it were remotely true, trickle down economics would have been a gold rush for the entire economy.

by VikingCoder

6/3/2026 at 7:24:08 PM

Not sure how generating exponentially more boilerplate is going to make anything more efficient. I guess we'll find out.

by amanaplanacanal

6/3/2026 at 6:20:53 PM

There are lots of new jobs in building data centers, plus all the components that go into those. For example, worldwide employee count at Amphenol is way up over the past couple years. They make a lot of electrical connectors and similar items.

by nradov

6/3/2026 at 6:31:45 PM

Temporary construction and manufacturing jobs are not actual replacements for the jobs lost. They'll be done after the data centers are built, and then we're just back to AI having destroyed tons of jobs with no replacements.

by pesus

6/3/2026 at 6:44:11 PM

Construction is never "done". New stuff is always being built. And eventually the old data centers will be demolished or remodeled, which also takes a huge amount of labor.

I think a lot of HN users still somehow don't understand the "lump of labor" fallacy.

https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/page-one-economics/2...

by nradov

6/3/2026 at 6:53:54 PM

Construction is in fact done at some point. You cannot build an unlimited amount of anything, let alone data centers.

Do you honestly believe there will be enough constant construction on data centers to replace millions of jobs lost to AI? Even if that was somehow true, there are tons of people that are not capable for one reason or another (age, physical fitness, etc) of doing construction work. Construction work also pays significantly less than many of the jobs being lost as is, so it's not a good replacement in that regard. And what happens when construction gets further streamlined and/or automated and requires fewer people? Or none at all, in the future?

Even your most optimistic hypothetical scenario results in millions of people doing hard manual labor for poverty wages. If anything, this just strengthens the case against AI and AI companies.

by pesus

6/3/2026 at 7:41:31 PM

Construction is in fact never done. If it's not data centers then it will be something else: high-rise residences, bridges, spaceports, oil refineries, whatever. People always want more stuff and we'll never hit a limit in our lifetimes. Skilled construction work is tough and occasionally dangerous but it pays pretty well.

https://mikeroweworks.org/

Speculation about science fiction automation scenarios is not a sound basis for public policy. Lots of things could happen in the future. We can't reasonably plan ahead for all possible contingencies.

by nradov

6/4/2026 at 12:24:38 AM

I like to think I'm generally more optimistic than average that AI growth will be a a net benefit to the economy, standard of living, and employment, but "AI creates jobs building AI data centers" is a terrible argument in favor of that optimistic idea.

Ignoring the fact that the number of data center construction jobs a given data center produces is probably vastly lower than the labor displacement possible with the compute power said data center will hold, the idea of losing your job due to AI only to get another job building data centers for more AI is some genuinely dystopian stuff.

I feel like AI would be a lot more popular if the proponents of building AI hadn't seem to have all gone to the Darth Vader school of PR. AI is a valuable tool because it allows skilled labor to be vastly more productive, not because it displaces skilled labor into jobs where they build they build the infrastructure for the robotic overlords that replaced them.

by rainsford

6/3/2026 at 5:54:09 PM

> And let's please not have any lazy, low-effort replies claiming that AI will somehow magically eliminate all jobs for humans.

This is essentially what a handful of c-suite execs have been telling the world for the past 2-3 years is it not?

by ryan_n

6/3/2026 at 6:58:24 PM

It seems obvious to me that AI will drastically reshape creative industries, and greatly lower the headcount required for analytical and programming industries, in the long term. The scope of its impact on the economy is likely greater than the Internet, social media, and the telephone.

Furthermore, AI companies and consulting companies themselves are selling this idea that it will completely reshape employment.

I find it more hand-wavey to say "it's just another technology change" than it is to say "this time it's different".

by unethical_ban

6/3/2026 at 7:46:36 PM

There is essentially infinite demand for software. Every time new technologies have made it cheaper to build software we've ended up with more new software, and more people employed in software development. There's no reason to expect that LLMs will change that historical pattern. We'll just be using higher level tools.

But most of the people creating digital media like animation, graphic art, and special effects are probably screwed. The next few years are going to be tough for them and they have my sympathies, but they're only a tiny fraction of the labor force.

by nradov

6/3/2026 at 8:32:32 PM

[flagged]

by 3ffss

6/3/2026 at 8:37:25 PM

Don't be pedantic. There may be resource limits but we're so far away from them that they're irrelevant: that's why software demand is essentially infinite for all practical purposes.

by nradov

6/3/2026 at 8:50:16 PM

[flagged]

by 3ffss

6/4/2026 at 3:26:16 AM

> Every new technology eliminates some old occupations and creates new ones [..] And let's please not have any lazy, low-effort replies

Yeah, a lazy, low-effort claim such as this doesn't really require replies, it can just fail to stand on its own.

by customguy

6/5/2026 at 3:45:42 AM

> I know many here would scoff at nationalizing a private company

Really? Do US public think like that, no wonder organization like IMF want to privatize national companies.

by nerdyadventurer

6/3/2026 at 5:20:15 PM

Why half of AI and not half of Walmart & Exxon & Apple?

Government spending is already ~40% of GDP.

And what do we get with this half?

A sovereign wealth fund? That seems like a great tool for a certain corrupt politician to use as a carrot to make CEO's bend to his/her whims.

What benefit does that have for anyone else?

You can't build a sovereign wealth fund if you're transferring all the money out. That's just more government spending, not a wealth fund...

by onlyrealcuzzo

6/3/2026 at 5:37:32 PM

They do this in Alaska's fund with great success[0] and Alaska is a deep red state. It's primarily funded by oil and gas revenue and other mineral royalties. Also thats only (at least) 25% of total revenue, the other 75% the state spends directly.

Norway's oil fund is another famous example mentioned in the article.[1]

[0]: https://apfc.org/

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Nor...

by fny

6/3/2026 at 5:45:24 PM

The oil is on Alaska/Norway's land, so they can choose what they want to do with money from selling that oil including distributing it or purchasing assets. Sanders seem to be proposing to arbitrarily seize half of the companies.

by Aunche

6/3/2026 at 5:56:20 PM

The oil companies are exploiting a public asset, so it's obvious the public would benefit. Who are the AI companies paying for the training data they're using?

by petesergeant

6/3/2026 at 5:57:53 PM

> The oil is on Alaska/Norway's land

These AI companies are on American land.

by vrganj

6/3/2026 at 7:06:38 PM

In the case of Alaska, the oil is literally on land owned by the State of Alaska (as in, the titleholder of the land is the state itself), and the rights to oil extraction is leased by the state to oil companies.

By contrast, data centers are generally going to be on land owned by the operator, and corporate offices are either owned by the company or leased to the company by some commercial real estate operator you've probably never heard of. In neither sense are they on land owned by any local, state, or federal government.

by jcranmer

6/3/2026 at 7:42:40 PM

The sovereign entity granting said private ownership is the state. It is privately owned only insofar as the state wills it.

by vrganj

6/3/2026 at 9:38:24 PM

> It is privately owned only insofar as the state wills it.

you mean as the people/voters wills it. Private ownership of land is pretty sacred law in the US, I don't see those laws being changed any time soon. Even logical things like the concept of eminent domain is very controversial.

by chasd00

6/4/2026 at 6:52:01 AM

Holy shit a realpolitiker. There is a God called "state" that WILLS the laws. Only by the power of prayer can one communicate with the sovereign, who whimsically discards centuries long legal traditions because a midwit read Schmitt or something.

by Garshtrot

6/3/2026 at 6:29:30 PM

The funny thing about data is... it can move across borders a lot better than oil deposits...

by onlyrealcuzzo

6/4/2026 at 2:27:47 PM

Data can.

Data centers at scale, less so.

But I suppose that's why Altman and Musk have been cozying up to autocratic Middle Eastern regimes and dreaming about AI in space...

by ethbr1

6/3/2026 at 5:55:38 PM

They seized all of humanity's intellectual output first.

by exe34

6/4/2026 at 6:53:19 AM

Where'd they put it? All my books are still on their shelves.

by Garshtrot

6/5/2026 at 6:47:35 AM

Is that why digital piracy is illegal?

by exe34

6/3/2026 at 6:10:18 PM

> Sanders seem to be proposing to arbitrarily seize half of the companies.

I guess it's only ok when the government arbitrarily seizes half my paycheck. If it happens to billionaires it's communism or something.

by triceratops

6/3/2026 at 6:44:30 PM

This isn't about income tax or capital gains tax, it's about the government seizing half of a privately owned company.

by fourseventy

6/3/2026 at 6:45:26 PM

In both cases the government takes half of something that belongs to an individual. Does it matter if it's cash or stock?

by triceratops

6/4/2026 at 4:31:04 AM

In fact when my company awards me stock the government takes half anyway!

by milch

6/3/2026 at 5:25:11 PM

Because AI companies basically took everything we ever wrote, drew, recorded, posted, or thought and turned it into a product with the power to lie, propagandize, and manipulate the public with zero oversight. Walmart is a parasite using welfare to subsidize their operations but they didn't tell a judge that they were immune to copyright because they stole just so much damn information.

by TehCorwiz

6/3/2026 at 5:36:59 PM

Yes but all the AI companies took all the public data, so when you pay for an AI model you are paying for the marginal service of building a model off that data, not for the data itself. What we should do is ensure that the data is available to more people to train AI models... but sadly this doesn't seem to be happening. Instead AI companies that were first-movers got to train off public data, and as the companies and businesses that own this data get wise they're going to start charging people to train off the data. This will make it much more difficult for anyone to train a model in the future as it will become expensive, and the companies that did happen to already train off public data will get a bit of incumbent's advantage.

by chrischen

6/3/2026 at 6:13:26 PM

I don't really buy this argument. When you buy a physical product, you are paying the entire product lifecycle, not just the marginal aspect of retail distribution. This is the same thing. The marginal inference has to come FROM somewhere. It doesn't just appear out of nowhere.

by forbiddenvoid

6/4/2026 at 11:06:32 AM

This is the same argument people were making about how stealing music was the same as stealing a physical product.

by chrischen

6/3/2026 at 6:29:25 PM

AI companies took public, private, and copyrighted data. Your position is that because these big companies stole so much we should let them get away with it by devaluing it further so everyone can ignore intellectual property law.

by Larrikin

6/4/2026 at 11:08:12 AM

They already "stole" it. They aren't giving it back and they've established their valuations based off of that. If they start paying now, it's simply going to be impossible for any more upstarts to do this or even release open-weight models because everyone with data will become rent seekers. Imagine if they started off with rent-seekers, we'd simply not have the benefit of these models at all at this point.

by chrischen

6/4/2026 at 2:47:30 AM

> when you pay for an AI model you are paying for the marginal service of building a model off that data, not for the data itself

Well no, you're also paying them for having done the work to "acquire" that data. That acquisition arguably amounts to the greatest theft in history.

by foobarchu

6/4/2026 at 11:10:03 AM

If I understand the correctly the initial models were done by scraping the internet off public data. They now probably pay for access, especially to companies that hold the data. Even in the latter case, the content creators probably don't see anything because they signed away their rights using whatever free service they uploaded their work / comment to. In hacker news' case I'm sure some bot is scraping my prose right now and training something with it, which I'm totally fine with because the act of trying to rent seek my 0.00001 cent of value in this post is not worth the detriment to AI advancement.

by chrischen

6/3/2026 at 6:42:30 PM

So if they only use public domain data, and data from the Chinese and Europeans, do you still feel entitled to their valuations?

Because I hate to break it to you, they could have zero drop in quality by just not incorporating US data...

If we're talking about copyright, why are we somehow entitled to profits derived from stealing Taylor Swift's IP? Why do you get a cut of AI derivatives and not get half of her wealth, too, directly?

Microsoft has trained models entirely on synthetic and public data with SotA results.

by onlyrealcuzzo

6/4/2026 at 2:48:44 AM

> Because I hate to break it to you, they could have zero drop in quality by just not incorporating US data...

This is so false and unsupportable it's comical. The same goes the other way, if you claim they would use no value by only incorporating American data.

by foobarchu

6/3/2026 at 5:41:46 PM

“Took?” AI companies aren’t removing the information from the public domain. What happened to “information wants to be free?”

by rayiner

6/3/2026 at 5:59:38 PM

I interpreted it to mean people feel as though they didn’t consent to having their information trained on, because for many folks, they published articles, open source projects, etc. assuming that they were only helping other people. It’s quite a shock to see megacorps use such data to create machines which threaten the livelihoods of the original authors themselves.

Also, much of the data used to train LLMs are not strictly public domain. For example, copyrighted books and source code with attribution-requiring licenses feature heavily in many corpuses. There are still pending lawsuits against the labs here, yet they continue to push forward. It’s no surprise that there is popular demand for redistribution.

by reasonableklout

6/3/2026 at 7:47:32 PM

> What happened to “information wants to be free?”

It was 1 part of an observation of opposed forces. “On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.”[1]

Some people removed the context and used it to say most information should be available to all. LLMs are information.

You thought this question proved what?

[1] https://sb.longnow.org/SB_homepage/Info_free_story.html

by pseudalopex

6/3/2026 at 5:52:17 PM

Individuals have faced federal charges and served prison time for reselling copyrighted content. I don't see the same happening to AI execs.

by antonyt

6/3/2026 at 6:06:58 PM

Are you proposing the Aaron Schwartz treatment by the government for Zuckerberg, Altman, and Amodei?

by triceratops

6/3/2026 at 6:06:53 PM

Yes. Took. As in: without permission. Didn't ask before hand, didn't provide a way to opt-out (although that would also be problematic), didn't ask for volunteers. Took.

by TehCorwiz

6/3/2026 at 6:12:00 PM

The word you're looking for is "copied".

Don't fall for the great lie of intellectual "property".

by ai_critic

6/3/2026 at 6:14:42 PM

If I can go to jail over it then they should too. Let's not judge them by some imaginary ideal world while judging individuals by the present crushing reality.

by TehCorwiz

6/3/2026 at 6:22:13 PM

But you can not. At least not in US. Basically, you can not go to jail for it almost anywhere.

by lostmsu

6/4/2026 at 2:05:11 PM

Aaron Swartz?

Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz

by DerArzt

6/4/2026 at 3:06:48 PM

Are you asking me to find evidence counter to my understanding of situation? Show that he was prosecuted for copying. From a quick skim I'm in doubt anything he was found guilty of is copying.

by lostmsu

6/3/2026 at 5:46:55 PM

[dead]

by speak_plainly

6/3/2026 at 6:09:40 PM

> Government spending is already ~40% of GDP.

> A sovereign wealth fund? That seems like a great tool for a certain corrupt politician to use as a carrot to make CEO's bend to his/her whims.

Use the sovereign wealth fund to reduce income taxes. Other countries manage to run wealth funds without corruption. If a country can't do it then, I hate to break it to you, it's definitely not the fund's fault.

> Why half of AI and not half of Walmart & Exxon & Apple?

Good question. The answer: a more broad-based wealth tax, in the form of assets which go into a sovereign wealth fund, is probably the only way to make the long-term pension math work out in developed countries. You can only tax labor so much when capital actually has the most growth.

by triceratops

6/3/2026 at 7:21:11 PM

Did those other companies literally steal the collective works of most citizens to do business?

No? Then that’s probably why not, don’t you think?

by therealpygon

6/3/2026 at 7:13:39 PM

> Why half of AI and not half of Walmart & Exxon & Apple?

I think the 50% number is a stake in the ground, period. A starting point for the discussion.

Why not Walmart? That's a great idea. Many companies, including Walmart, pay their employees so little that they qualify for Medicaid and other social benefits even though they're working full-time.

One of the primary methods of building wealth in this country is through stock ownership. Instead of being a wage slave, only making money based on your labor, with a stock tax on a company, the growth of that company's stock benefits everyone in the country directly, rather than just the moneyed few.

> A sovereign wealth fund? That seems like a great tool for a certain corrupt politician to use as a carrot to make CEO's bend to his/her whims.

That is a risk with an administration like the current one, but if the sovereign fund was ethically managed by an independent department, that wouldn't be an issue. The rest of the world has sovereign wealth funds, and you can find some good examples of how to do it right.

> What benefit does that have for anyone else?

How do you benefit with a 401k owning stock? What works for one should work for the other.

> You can't build a sovereign wealth fund if you're transferring all the money out. That's just more government spending, not a wealth fund.

How does any sovereign wealth fund increase its value? Proper planning, spending only dividends and not principal. Also, the sovereign wealth fund would continue to acquire stock whenever any company issues new stock. The fund would get 50% of those shares.

If one were to make it an active fund, the government has enough insider knowledge to know when to buy, sell, and short stocks. What? Using insider knowledge is unfair, you say? Why shouldn't the government play by the same rules as the rest of the finance industry? It's only us retail investors that have less-than-optimal returns because of insufficient knowledge.

by rickydroll

6/3/2026 at 5:25:30 PM

From the article:

> Let us be clear. Artificial intelligence was not created out of thin air. The data and language used by generative A.I. tools didn’t just pop into Sam Altman’s head or Elon Musk’s imagination. A.I. is built on our collective intelligence: our books, songs, artwork, journalism, computer code, scientific research, videos, conversations, images and ideas spanning generations.

by baliex

6/3/2026 at 5:31:21 PM

And the ones spanning generations were completely fair game. The ones that were still under copyright are a different matter. (It has not, so far as I know, been legally decided, but it's probably going to depend on whether AI is a transformative use.)

by AnimalMuppet

6/3/2026 at 5:41:59 PM

> The ones that were still under copyright are a different matter.

Given the sheer volume of information posted to the Internet in the last 40-50 years, I'd wager that covers 80% or more of the relevant input data.

Old text is relatively scarce in the grand scheme of things.

But I have no real clue, just spitballing.

by macintux

6/3/2026 at 6:06:03 PM

> And the ones spanning generations were completely fair game.

No they weren't. Copyright at this point covers things for at least half a dozen generations back, and is intentionally made annoying enough that it is difficult to find out what is covered and what isn't. LLM companies didn't bother with any of that (they just pirated like your average online 13 year old), meanwhile archive.org got sued for pulling the music off ancient wax cylinders.

Clean up and dramatically shorten, restrict, or even eliminate copyright, and we can start talking about what's fair game or not. People were afraid to sing "Happy Birthday" in movies for probably 80 years, and the corporations that own all IP made it very clear at the time that they preferred for the status of "Happy Birthday" to remain unclear, and would send you a scary letter if you used it.

> probably going to depend on whether AI is a transformative use.

It's probably going to be entirely political, and decided through corruption. It's obviously a mechanical transformation. If rap DJ's got sued for cramming songs full of 80 extremely manipulated samples that you'd need a forensics expert to trace, and all sampled music had to revert to a form where they'd license a single song and re-release it with somebody rapping over it, LLMs are a violation. DJ's were doing an absolutely creative translation, and LLMs are not creative, they are Δ-following pinball machines.

by pessimizer

6/4/2026 at 3:21:53 AM

Gov't spending is 38% and that's totally normal, if a bit low. France is at 57%, the UK at 44%, and Japan at 39%

by culi

6/3/2026 at 6:30:46 PM

And given that the training data is very much international, why would this be just a USA-sovereign fund and not a world-fund?

by p2detar

6/4/2026 at 3:27:46 PM

LLMs have been trained on the collective output of the global population. That is why.

by AlwaysRock

6/3/2026 at 5:43:52 PM

The focus on AI is just to capture some of the current zeitgeist. Socialists generally think that most large businesses be run for the public benefit in some form or another.

This is basically making that point with AI companies as their true influence is rapidly increasing. The rhetorical strategy here is to hook socialist ideas onto something people are already thinking about, a land-and-expand rhetorical strategy.

Personally I'm against the proposal, but the details are not the point because it's not going happen in this form. It's about changing minds first, then changing policy down the road.

by _alternator_

6/3/2026 at 5:46:34 PM

You get Social Security and Medicare. Which are cheaper now than they will ever be, as the population is only getting older.

by closeparen

6/3/2026 at 5:45:02 PM

> sovereign wealth fund? That seems like a great tool for a certain corrupt politician to use as a carrot to make CEO's bend to his/her whims.

Taking ownership of these companies is a Bernie thing not a Trump thing, but a sovereign wealth fund is used to pay off national debt.

by nailer

6/3/2026 at 6:37:40 PM

You can't "pay off debt" with a "wealth fund".

You won't have any "wealth" if you use it.

That's just taxing and spending...

by onlyrealcuzzo

6/3/2026 at 9:14:39 PM

Depends how much of the wealth you use but yes you're right - Norway and Singapore offset debt with the fund rather than pay it back.

by nailer

6/3/2026 at 5:28:34 PM

They know it will tank and want you money to save their friends.

by npodbielski

6/3/2026 at 6:53:01 PM

The linked post explains in detail why. Sanders thinks that AI will be "the most transformational technology in the history of the world", radically changing everything about our lives, and thus control of AI will shape the future of humanity in a way that control of Walmart or Exxon or Apple does not.

Perhaps you don't agree with him, although I would note that it's pretty rare for Bernie Sanders to agree with billionaires about how important something they've invented is! But if you don't take people seriously when they say they think AI is the most important thing that's happened in our lifetime, you're going to be endlessly confused when they act according to that belief.

by SpicyLemonZest

6/3/2026 at 5:53:53 PM

Because unlike AI companies Apple, Walmart, Exxon are not taking away all human generated knowledge and dumping in their data centers?

by geodel

6/3/2026 at 5:17:46 PM

Strictly speaking, the big A.I. companies _want_ the public to own half of them. Passively. In index ETFs in their 401(k)s and other retirement portfolios. That way the get all the money without any of the actual influence.

by Arubis

6/3/2026 at 6:11:09 PM

Sure but they want the public to pay for the privilege of owning half.

by triceratops

6/3/2026 at 6:36:00 PM

Oh yes. Very much so. And ideally without thinking or actively having to choose—hence the get-on-the-index-funds angle.

by Arubis

6/3/2026 at 6:29:33 PM

I love it, this is exactly the kind of thing government is meant to do, bring externalities to profit under control. There is something that's been stolen from all of us, collectively, and certain authors and artists, specifically, the creative soul we all pour into our expression, here, there, and everywhere online.

I yeeted my Reddit account as soon as I learned it was being used, without my consent, to train AI. I now have regrets, that I didn't delete all my comments there recursively first. However, because everything I posted there (and I posted quite a bit!) is part of the training data, it's interesting to know that every future AI is going to have a little bit of my resistance to authority, and lateral thinking, and just a bit of uppity in it, because of me. ;-)

So, to yank part of the profits from our stolen soul back, via a TAX, seems quite reasonable to this Citizen of the United States. No money going out, just asserting authority, and collecting something on behalf of all of us, is a brilliant strategy for offsetting part of the theft they did first.

by mikewarot

6/3/2026 at 6:27:46 PM

The public should own more than half. Via the stock market. Where public shareholders can vote in elections to control the Board of Directors, and elect Directors that act in the fiduciary interests of shareholders, and return excess capital to shareholders by issuing dividends. Where any member of the public can decide to buy or sell shares, being the most important development in the democratization of wealth development in all of human history, second only to the index fund that let members of the public put wealth development on autopilot?

When did public ownership mean that the government needed to be the owner? And when did we start to allow companies to float so few shares that public shareholder voting rights became largely meaningless?

by solatic

6/3/2026 at 6:48:43 PM

This comment really drives home the effective propaganda of “publicly owned” as a term.

Concentrated ownership of the wealthy is not synonymous with “the public.” You are very literally arguing for plutocracy over democracy.

by jdgoesmarching

6/4/2026 at 4:55:54 AM

> Concentrated ownership of the wealthy is not synonymous with “the public.”

I 100% agree. It's terrible that large private companies like Cargill and any others large enough to make this list: https://www.forbes.com/lists/top-private-companies/ are allowed to continue operating without being forced to list on stock markets and being subject to public reporting requirements. There's a very big difference between concentrated ownership by the wealthy and public ownership.

> You are very literally arguing for plutocracy over democracy

You can only assume that public markets results in plutocracy if individual investors hold outsize amounts of outstanding shares. The elections for Boards of Directors are not competitive when an individual shareholder holds majority voting power. There is a separate argument for a wealth tax that I agree with, and there are arguments to be made for maximum share prices (reaching the maximum triggers an automatic stock split) to guarantee financial accessibility (cough, BRK.A, cough).

by solatic

6/3/2026 at 6:40:55 PM

The public doesn't have that much money.

by triceratops

6/4/2026 at 4:38:10 AM

Then perhaps the big AI companies aren't actually worth that much.

by solatic

6/3/2026 at 6:56:33 PM

The government could distribute its ownership stake to individuals.

by BrenBarn

6/3/2026 at 8:49:59 PM

That won't lead to corruption at all.

by triceratops

6/3/2026 at 5:57:22 PM

Taking 50% of a few valuable companies for no compensation is just expropriation. Not that this has political legs, but even if it did, expect an enormous fight. The more obviously legal (and stupendously expensive) route would be eminent domain.

by sobellian

6/4/2026 at 4:29:27 AM

Shouldn't be a problem, as AI companies expropriated knowledge and jobs.

by gettingoverit

6/3/2026 at 6:16:30 PM

Lately I've been thinking about digital co-ops. Imagine a member owned server farm for running private AI models and cloud services. It could be small, like a neighborhood or citywide project running on cobbled together used hardware like that post the other day where someone got an older server GPU running on his PC. Or it could be a small data center for small businesses and individual users to use. Members could have more privacy than giving all their data to companies like Google and they could have a say in what hardware is used and what type of energy generation is used to power it. There seem to have been more posts over the last couple years about running home media servers and getting away from subscription services; maybe something like that could be an alternative to what we have now.

by NDlurker

6/3/2026 at 7:14:35 PM

There was a show HN for something similar a couple months ago[0]. Looks like they shut it down. Probably too difficult/low-margin to run as a business, but I think the co-op model you mentioned has potential.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47639779

by supermdguy

6/3/2026 at 7:47:15 PM

I think a co-op would appeal to the same demographic who are into mesh networks plus all the anti-Flock people. Maybe I'll start something with my friend group and see how it goes from there.

by NDlurker

6/3/2026 at 6:38:26 PM

The thing about owning is that it messes up the incentives. If the government owns something, it will be tempting to intervene if it loses value. And when he government needs money, they often sell at stupid prices. I think taxing makes more sense.

by didibus

6/3/2026 at 7:05:45 PM

What about something like carbon credits? Every citizen gets awarded a yearly AI usage credit. If a company wants to use an LLM, they have to buy the usage from the public market. People can use their own credits freely.

by mrdependable

6/3/2026 at 6:40:26 PM

> If the government owns something, it will be tempting to intervene if it loses value.

Valid point. I'd propose that if the government owns anything it only gets non-voting shares. And it should never own a controlling share of anything.

> And when he government needs money, they often sell at stupid prices.

I'd apply some kind of indexing algorithm. Leaving it to individual managers is bound to lead to corruption.

by triceratops

6/3/2026 at 5:47:57 PM

To paraphrase Margin Call, the pubic will soon be left holding the biggest bag of odorous Xcrement assembled in the history of IPOs.

We will all own half, just not the good half.

by agnosticmantis

6/3/2026 at 5:55:31 PM

The quickest way to lose the AI battle to China and reinstate censorship and model political bias is to hand the industry over to the government. This doesn’t just benefit democrats, whatever political party is in power will use them as tools of political means. Not to mention almost certainly pricing won’t act in accordance with free market forces but instead be regulated. See healthcare.

by nodesocket

6/3/2026 at 6:08:53 PM

This is more interesting than it looks, because it's using normal corporate control rather than regulation.

Obviously the current stakeholders hate losing control and wealth, but that's not the biggest issue.

Senator Sander's goal is not for some vast public to share the wealth, but for the government to have a veto on what gets done, to limit the collateral damage/exported costs. That's a classical government function.

However, the record of regulatory capture is nearly perfect, so it's likely the reverse would be achieved: the government-sponsored providers being a required intermediary in all knowledge work, with a corresponding incentive to seize those reins.

The probabilistic range of possibilities looks bleak: Now that all regulatory or quasi-governmental agencies of any import (Fed, FDA, EPA, Congress, Courts, CPB) have demonstrated remarkable plasticity to political whim, one would anticipate the worst would come of creating a political franchise out of fighting for control over AI; it would corrupt other aspects of politics.

by w10-1

6/3/2026 at 5:33:42 PM

This sounds like the new "thats people's retirement," because if we convert 50% of every AI company into a sovereign wealth fund (which is already a questionable seizure anyway), suddenly it will become politically untenable to do anything that might put that fund in danger, like... regulating anything, or even not bailing out a company thats struggling.

by deaton

6/3/2026 at 5:51:10 PM

If a 1T company struggles do you really think we (the US) wouldn't bail them out just like the banks and the auto industry?

by none2585

6/3/2026 at 8:37:58 PM

Instead of "The Public.." read it as "The Government Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies" because that's what it really means. It doesn't sound all that great now does it? Imagine what a red/blue administration would do with complete control of those AI capabilities.

by chasd00

6/4/2026 at 4:28:32 PM

I'm sympathetic to the argument that AI is built without recompense on the work of all humanity, but anyone else think that's a lot of words to say "government backstop"? ;-)

Personally, I'm very bullish on AI but it's not so clear that the frontier labs have (so far) a business model that justifies their valuations. Having the government own a substantial stake in them sounds like it could set up some very perverse incentives.

Furthermore a significant ownership stake also comes with a degree of control, and we do not want any government to have that much control over what is going to be THE biggest influence vector in the history of humanity.

by keeda

6/3/2026 at 6:50:13 PM

If the public wants to own half of the AI company, then they should invest enough to buy half of it. Taking private property away without compensation is stealing. What the government did with Intel where they got 10% in stock was a bit better because Intel got money.

by pokstad

6/3/2026 at 7:06:53 PM

You basically described taxation. 25-75% of all your income is confiscated at the source and then you get… whatever it is that Washington does. I guess remit the money back as programs and direct payments or services so thousands of people can wet their beak in the process?

In practice, we’re OK with theft. We just argue over who gets the loot and which segment of the population gets harmed.

by opsnooperfax

6/3/2026 at 7:30:27 PM

There is a line between tax and unlawful taking. The constitution forbids taking of property without due process or compensation. No, the government can't just take whatever it likes from anyone and call it a tax.

Taxes generally demand payment in the form of general assets, but taking targets specific identified property. Likewise taxes are raised from a general category whereas taking singles out one or a few properties. Now if it was just the targeting of AI companies you could argue it's a one-time AI tax rather than singling out those companies for taking. But once you state that the tax must be paid by shares (and not just assets equal to 50% of market cap) that looks less like a tax and more like appropriation of equity for public good without compensation.

There are other vulnerabilities too - income taxes are explicitly exempted from apportionment. This "tax" would probably run afoul of apportionment.

by sobellian

6/4/2026 at 6:02:20 AM

Eminent domain. It can be made to apply to AI.

by thedevilslawyer

6/3/2026 at 7:03:05 PM

Is income tax stealing?

by snake42

6/3/2026 at 6:57:37 PM

I mean gen AI is based on theft, I don't really see that as a deterrent. I don't want the companies to exist, and having government ownership sounds like a convenient way to get bailed out when the bubble pops

by LetsGetTechnicl

6/3/2026 at 8:54:00 PM

That only is true if you agree with IP laws. China doesn’t, and you won’t be able to take 50% of the Chinese AI companies. American AI companies won’t be able to compete against Chinese ones if we take that stance.

by pokstad

6/3/2026 at 9:52:19 PM

This is why public ownership makes sense. The public allows AI to get the data that it would otherwise need to steal in order to be globally competitive, and in return, the company that builds the AI allows the public to own it.

by lern_too_spel

6/3/2026 at 5:23:54 PM

As long as they're non-voting shares, I don't see the harm.

I assume not enough politicians in this senator's camp were given their early cut so this is retribution/a lesson to the abstract "Big Tech" to show that DC is still the city that rules the world.

by scottyah

6/3/2026 at 5:36:40 PM

Why non-voting shares? That kind of defeats the point of partial ownership.

If the models were built using the output of all of human effort over time, then society at large should absolutely have a voice in the direction of the companies.

This tech should be made for public benefit, not for purely profit and private interests.

Quite frankly, most companies should be worker co-ops instead, and its long passed time we start moving to that model.

by thewebguyd

6/3/2026 at 6:31:53 PM

Anyone can start a worker co-op, and anyone can decide to shop at them. We're well past the point where anyone can argue what should be the right way to manage a company because you can just do it. I think even the franchise model is like a large scale co-op.

The models just take the same information available to anyone and make it more useful, it's not like oil or mining where it's a consumable that people share, nor is it taking from the youth- in fact it's one of the best ways of utilizing the knowledge of the past.

Honestly, the a lot of the people I hear complaining about having a "voice" about "output of all of human effort over time" are usually not the ones who put the information out on the web/books, as they are usually doing it for the benefit of future humans and not for profit. Seems to be the same as PMs or VCs trying to "capture the value" of other people.

by scottyah

6/3/2026 at 6:12:09 PM

> Why non-voting shares? That kind of defeats the point of partial ownership.

Not really, no. Ownership gets you a share of the profits and profits can be used to reduce income taxes. I think non-voting is wise. It prevents political and partisan meddling.

by triceratops

6/3/2026 at 5:35:25 PM

The public includes the rest of the world, not just a small minority living in the United States.

by mynameismon

6/3/2026 at 11:55:06 PM

Better idea, mandate 4 days work week and 30 days PTO, the labor squeeze such law would cause will bring wages up and offsets AI productivity boost impact and pays people back in lifetime.

by yowo

6/4/2026 at 6:00:13 AM

This could have a shot if we also recommend to companies that, they should convert overall pay to ~2/3 for employees, and with the 1/3 extra hire more people. so every company that opts in has no higher people budget, but generates more employment.

This only requires that everyone take a pay cut to help their peer citizens. I would sign up for this. But would the majority - would you? yes/no - and why?

by orangecoffee

6/3/2026 at 7:08:57 PM

Under no conditions should the government own AI companies. The government has its hands in too many companies already. What needs to happen is stricter enforcement of copyright laws and intellectual property rights. In other words, AI training data should be curtailed substantially until such time as the companies are willing to pay for it. It's no different than the various other internet piracy issues, e.g., movies and music. Just more hype at the moment. That too will pass.

by Blackstrat

6/3/2026 at 5:35:03 PM

I am repulsed by this because it will obviously be the vehicle through which tax money will be directed into Altman & Co's pockets, but I also understand that they will get bailed out whether the government gets a share or not.

As long as they are voting shares, I don't see an increase in the harm. I'd like to see a legislative framework about how that ownership is handled that allows Congress and regulatory agencies to make decisions restricting how these companies will operate, but without any regard to the constitutional rights of the corporate persons or their owners.

I'm sick of the government arguing with monopolies, then taking dives. I want it to be abundantly clear that government has the ability to restrict these AI utility companies freely (such as their ability to feed on their customers), while still limiting the rights that the state has over the personal use of AI by private individuals. Partial state ownership will make that possible. Hell, let half their boards be publicly elected.

by pessimizer

6/6/2026 at 9:59:35 AM

50% property tax is just seizure without compensation, which is generally considered human rights violation.

If government wants 50% of shares, it can just buy it (or expropriate it with compensation) and use its ability to get cheap long-term loans to finance it.

by zajio1am

6/3/2026 at 5:15:12 PM

Bernard, this may not be the best time. This market is gonna go nuclear...

by alphawhisky

6/3/2026 at 5:16:40 PM

[dead]

by Helloworldboy

6/3/2026 at 5:41:28 PM

I strongly dislike the belief that people should be compensated when others find ingenious ways to profit off of publicly-available data.

We live in a world where "creating value" (doing things that others find helpful) and "capturing value" (getting those people to pay you money) are two different things. If I give my mom a hug, I'm creating value, but that's not necessarily something I'm going to charge her for it. Most value created by people won't ever be captured. And that's a good thing imo.

It keeps the world moving, removes friction, and allows for authenticity. There's nothing wrong with wanting to capture value, of course. But the second you do that, you're a business. And "capturing value" has a huge set of tasks and responsibilities you now have to handle.

But there's an intuition that has gradually built up over centuries, alongside the growth of "intellectual property" as a concept. It's best paraphrased as, "I want to be compensated for the value I create, without doing any of the work to capture it. And if someone else finds an ingenious way to capture some of the value that I've created, then they should pay me."

To some degree, I understand and agree with the sentiment.

Nothing is built in a vacuum. No person or company is an island. Everything is built on top of public infrastructure and works created by the country, laid by our forefathers. This is just one of many reasons why I believe in a progressive tax system. To the extent that you're able to capture large amounts of value in America, a lot of that is made possible by the infra you're building on top of, which is owned by the public, and a progressive tax system is a good way to to share that with the public.

(Of course, this has its own problems, bc the government collecting taxes is not enough, it has to spend those funds wisely, for the benefit of all. Which it obviously doesn't do, at the federal level, or at many state and city levels. So I've always found it a bit perplexing for people to clamor for more taxation while caring little about how tax revenues are spent. But that's a discussion for another time.)

But overall, I don't like this intuition, because it's essentially rent-seeking behavior.

Capturing value is hard. Simply creating value is not enough. If you write a song, or you build an app, or you cook a meal, you still have all your work ahead of you to find a customer/consumer, and understand what they find valuable enough to pay for, and ensure your offering matches that, and do the marketing/sales to get it in front of them, and convince them to pay, and scale to more people, and manage your books, and do all of this profitably.

Expecting to be paid for simply creating value but doing none of the work to capture the value to me feels a little bit entitled. Or, at the very least, naive.

What's interesting is that certain industries have more or less entitlement here, depending on the influence of "intellectual property" in that industry.

For example, there's almost no concept of intellectual property in the cooking. If you invent a new recipe, you can't really patent it and tell everybody else that they're not allowed to make it. So, pretty much every chef is okay with the fact that they need to actually capture value by opening a restaurant or going to work for one.

It's similar in the software industry, where rather than patenting all of our software and trying to enforce it, we generally do the opposite and release software in an open-source way. We're quite aware that if we want to profit, we'll need to start our own startup, and we have no qualms with that.

But with writing, music, etc., you see a lot more creators who want to just do the creation part, who don't want to do the business part, but who then want the profits that the business part enables.

I can empathize for sure, I get it. But I think a world with less rent-seeking behavior is better. A world where more people understand what it takes to capture value and are willing to do it (or happy to just not do it) is a better world. A world where more people feel entitled to the profits earned by those who are able to capture value, I think, is worse.

by csallen

6/3/2026 at 6:32:40 PM

It's entitled for others to believe they have any say in what happens with the work of others. The world without these protections would be worse off by far. What I gather from what you are saying is that if I write a song, or a book, anyone else should be able to take what I've done and make their own money off it. By that logic, a publisher wouldn't need to compensate writers. Record executives wouldn't need to compensate musicians. Whoever holds the means for extracting value are at a huge permanent advantage.

We haven't gotten to where we are in the world today by giving the wealthy huge permanent advantages. Look at the explosion in innovation that has happened since public education has become widespread. It used to be only the wealthy that could afford to be educated. Part of what makes capitalism work at all is by not allowing the means to capture value to be monopolized.

by mrdependable

6/3/2026 at 11:14:44 PM

Copyright is literally the granting of monopolies. That's the whole point of it.

Copyright benefits huge corporations way more than "the little guy." The biggest holders of copyrights and patents are huge corporations, many of which are often bought explicitly for the purpose of warding off competition from new upstarts.

These huge companies (e.g. Disney) also use their massive war chests to lobby the government into extending copyright terms. What used to just be 14 years of a limited monopoly has now been extended to hundreds of years. They're quite literally capturing and monopolizing the value.

When you look at what the average person does, generally speaking, it has little to do with patents and copyrights. The massive amount of creation and creativity we've seen online, with people riffing on art, music, video, code, etc., has largely involved infringing on copyrights held by the rich and powerful, and hoping to god we don't get sued.

Meaning:

(1) Copyright is in no way necessary for encouraging creativity, which was its original mandate. The evidence is in, and people create and innovate a ton without needing to have some sort of monopoly on everything they do.

(2) Far from protecting the little guy from the big guy, copyright has done the exact opposite, given the big guys huge legal recourse to sue little guys into oblivion, block innovation, block competition, and profit forever.

"The means of production" is an antiquated idea. Look at the reality on the ground. Producing and distributing has never been easier, never been more available to the masses, never been more popular. Big companies do not have a monopoly on the means. This whole copyright nonsense is an idea from the days when the printing press was a new invention, and the average person couldn't print. That's no longer true today.

Also, just from a theory perspective, we never made it so that you can copyright and patent recipes, no matter how creative they are. And yet, mom and pop restaurants have always flourished. Copyrights aren't enforced heavily in the software industry. In fact, just the opposite: we have open source. And yet, individual developers can thrive. This idea that without copyright, big companies are just going to steal everything from the little guy and the little guy will have no chance is just not true. The places where you see that happening the most are the places that have the strongest copyright protections, e.g. the music industry, the publishing industry, etc.

by csallen

6/4/2026 at 12:25:44 AM

You say means of production is an antiquated idea, but the world you are using as an example of the idea being unnecessary is a world where copyright exists. The world would look very different otherwise, and you can actually get a sneak peek of what would happen by looking at AI companies. These are not people using ingenuity to capture value that no else bothered to. They are owners of massive capital training for free on everyone's work to not only capture their value in ways the little guy can't, but to replace them outright.

by mrdependable

6/4/2026 at 4:11:03 AM

> * training for free on everyone's work*

"Training on other people's work" has always been free for anyone to do for the entire history of humanity, and that shouldn't change. You do not get paid just because somebody read your work and learned from it, nor should you, unless you want to gatekeep it and charge for access.

As Jefferson said, "If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."

> …to not only capture their value in ways the little guy can't…

So what? Big companies can do things that little companies can't. That's always been true and always will be true. What does this have to do with copyright?

> …but to replace them outright

Computers replaced jobs. Cars replaced jobs. AI is replacing jobs. Etc. So what? What does this have to do with copyright?

by csallen

6/4/2026 at 7:09:14 AM

An AI training is not equivalent to a human learning, despite how we like to anthropomorphize the process, and ideas are not protected by copyright in the first place.

Your point was that people that create something valuable are not entitled to stop others from capturing the value of their creation, ostensibly because they “don’t want to do the hard work.” My point is that even if someone did want to do the work, the benefit would go to the people with the money and infrastructure to act on it. In your vision, IBM would just take Windows and slap their name on it. Where would that have left Microsoft?

Computers and cars don’t rely on the intellectual output of others to function. AI still needs people doing the work that it is displacing, but it strips the economic incentive to do it.

by mrdependable

6/4/2026 at 9:21:00 AM

> An AI training is not equivalent to a human learning, despite how we like to anthropomorphize the process

How is it different in a way that's relevant here?

> My point is that even if someone did want to do the work, the benefit would go to the people with the money and infrastructure to act on it.

That's not true. Millions of entrepreneurs every year create companies, and do hard work, and capture value, without having to rely on copyrights/patents.

> In your vision, IBM would just take Windows and slap their name on it. Where would that have left Microsoft?

In a different world, things would be different. So? That doesn't mean that world would be worse.

For example, imagine a world where recipes are patentable. The inventor of pizza would own Pizza, Inc., and no one else on earth would be allowed to make or sell pizza. It would be their intellectual property. And Disney would buy up tons of food patents and own an exclusive license to make french fries and cookies and milkshakes. And someone in that world would ask the same question you're asking, "Omg, without recipe patents, Gil Bates never would've been able to start Spaghetti, Inc., because The Olive Garden would've just been allowed to make spaghetti, too! What a nightmare!" But here we are, living in a universe where everyone can make spaghetti, and no one else has the right to tell other people they're not allowed to make spaghetti just because some other guy did it first. And it's just fine.

> Computers and cars don’t rely on the intellectual output of others to function.

Sure, different inventions work differently. What does that matter?

by csallen

6/4/2026 at 4:57:05 PM

I suppose if Spaghetti Inc and Olive Garden were in the business of creating and licensing recipes, they would both be in trouble. But they are selling labor and ingredients, which is what people are paying for. Also, pizza and spaghetti have been around a long time and patents don't last forever, so I don't see how this applies.

Maybe a better example would be to explain how drug companies are able to cover the cost of research and development, or how Studio Ghibli is able to invest in animating a movie that anyone can sell. Should everyone provide the full suite of services a business needs in order to earn a profit? That seems like an inefficient way to organize the economy. The mechanical engineer also has to be a marketer or else he doesn't deserve to be paid for an invention? How does that make sense?

> Sure, different inventions work differently. What does that matter?

You cut the sentence that answers the question.

by mrdependable

6/4/2026 at 8:08:10 PM

You're essentially just saying that you can't imagine a world in which there are business models that are different than the existing business models today. Which I don't really get, because there are plenty of businesses that don't rely on patents or copyrights to do business. Plenty of ways to make money in other ways.

- Let's take music, for example, which is a form of content. Where do artists make most of their money? From touring, from actually going out and playing, which is a form of labor.

- Let's look at code, which is another form of content. How do tech startups make most of their money? From copyrighting and licensing their code? No. From hosting and serving it, which is a form of digital labor.

- Etc.

Drug companies I'm sure would find a way. They would just have to transition from being intellectual property holders (making money on high margins) to being service and manufacturing specialists. But people would find a way to make a profit, just like they do in every other competitive industry.

The idea that you need copyrights and patents in order to spur investment, research, creativity, or capitalistic enterprise is completely false, and thoroughly disproven.

by csallen

6/3/2026 at 6:50:07 PM

But isn't that exactly what's going on here? An ai-company has created value by developing these models, and the public should capture that value via the instrument of government.

by Fraterkes

6/3/2026 at 11:17:06 PM

That's called taxes, and I'm all for it.

by csallen

6/3/2026 at 6:59:58 PM

The thought I've toyed with was forcing public companies in some industries to issue some percentage of stocks to the government... And then using incentives to get them to pay dividends.

by VikingCoder

6/3/2026 at 6:09:35 PM

I'm sorry to say, but this is a losing position, as in one you only adopt when you've already lost and are trying to bargain. It presupposes that the AI companies are unregulateable, and that the only possible avenue of influence/dividend is through ownership. Contrast with the traditional idea that when companies create harm, the government works to stop that harm by default. Or that if these companies actually do succeed at rolling up up the distributed economy into a handful of centralized companies, the government steps in to tax their outsized gains to preserve some semblance of a distributed economy. Furthermore, what does said "ownership" actually do ? If the government is unable to regulate these companies, then it is also unable to reliably exercise a voting interest or insist on receiving dividends - if the companies are this powerful, then whoever actually controls them can always alter the terms and reject the "owners'" demands.

by mindslight

6/6/2026 at 3:46:56 AM

Cool cool can we own half of all of the other industries that benefit from the commons? Oil, gas, gold,…?

by stevenalowe

6/6/2026 at 3:52:41 AM

If you don't already, you should have a stake in your countries natural resources, such as Norway's stake in their oil.

by defrost

6/6/2026 at 3:07:43 PM

That would be great but apparently it doesn’t work like that here (except Alaska)

by stevenalowe

6/3/2026 at 5:59:23 PM

This would have a massive chilling effect on the private sector as a whole. IMO it would completely destroy investment in America. American companies and markets get extraordinary investor interest due to strong property rights. Once those rights are gone there will be massive capital flight and greatly reduced investment.

Imo this proposal is even worse than a billionaire wealth tax (which has all sorts of implementation issues).

by theLiminator

6/4/2026 at 7:01:13 AM

Fortunately this rslurration is further whining by people who can not. It's fun reading their impotent anger but, that's all it is.

by Garshtrot

6/3/2026 at 5:51:51 PM

Once they IPO, the public will in fact own much of them.

by satvikpendem

6/3/2026 at 8:30:23 PM

[flagged]

by 2ffaa

6/3/2026 at 5:41:28 PM

I don’t have an opinion on this specific proposal, but I am glad to hear a politician talking about the effects of AI.

I feel like I’m going crazy sometimes. Over the next few years we will see the biggest change to employment our country has ever seen. Our entire financial structure is about to be upended, and not a single politician is talking about it. It’s so weird that all I think about is AI, yet not a single politician seems to notice. (Or maybe they do and that’s why they’re pillaging the country.)

by gkoberger

6/3/2026 at 5:44:15 PM

> It’s so weird that all I think about is AI,

Maybe this is a place to start?

by dylan604

6/3/2026 at 8:24:17 PM

Hackers should think of slavery reparations when they think of Sanders' proposal. Not as an equivalent, but as a more credible and similarly untenable idea. Sanders' being to take from those who produce to give to those who likely had almost no hand in the production, and with certainly no attempt to discern what contribution that may have been.

by akramachamarei

6/3/2026 at 9:29:48 PM

The Alaskan sovereign wealth fund is a much better metaphor.

by dwaltrip

6/4/2026 at 12:18:10 AM

I see the comparison--like AI companies are mining value out of public corpora, somewhat like how an oil or mining company extracts resources from the earth. An important difference being that when minerals are extracted they are removed from common use, unlike when a model is trained, which does not subtract from the commons (at least not directly, or substantially?)

by akramachamarei

6/4/2026 at 4:40:49 AM

And by "the public" he means "the American public".

by mvdtnz

6/3/2026 at 7:56:28 PM

If I'm being entirely honest, I actually do not think that Donald Trump being de-facto CEO of OpenAI and Anthropic is a great idea. In fact, I do not think that Joe Biden being that is a great idea, but I definitely think we would have ruined this technology if we had Trump in charge of it. It's much better this way, where he expresses some power in his role as the government's chief executive and the founders of the AI companies comply in the way they do or resist in the way they do.

In addition, what would the public do with AI companies? They think that AI inference sucks up oceans of water. The same thing would happen here as happened to nuclear reactors after the NRC was made - it would take half a century before the first reactor approved after the NRC was set up to start up.

by arjie

6/4/2026 at 12:32:23 AM

Grab Sears and JC Penney while you're in there.

by effnorwood

6/4/2026 at 7:03:39 AM

Maybe the public should own half of everything.

by Garlef

6/3/2026 at 5:55:43 PM

"Envy was once considered to be one of the seven deadly sins before it became one of the most admired virtues under its new name, social justice." - Thomas Sowell

by mudil

6/3/2026 at 6:10:23 PM

If we are pulling quotes out of a hat, why not some OG one?

“He who oppresses the poor taunts and insults his Maker, But he who is kind and merciful and gracious to the needy honors Him.” Proverbs 14:31

by morbicer

6/3/2026 at 6:12:49 PM

"Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's..."

by triceratops

6/3/2026 at 6:38:02 PM

That's one of my favorite verses, specifically because it leaves determining what is in fact Caesar's as an exercise for the reader.

by Ancapistani

6/3/2026 at 6:17:37 PM

Between California and the federal government the public is already going to receive half the value of the equity in cash. The only question is will they buy back in ?

by vincefutr23

6/3/2026 at 6:59:03 PM

Yeah because collective ownership worked out so well for everything from Soviet cars to Venezuelan oil. Anyone speaking for "the people" is either an evil scumbag or a useful idiot for future ones. "People" are composed of individuals. Most individuals' content is nearly worthless for AI training (and some like Sanders' are probably harmful, they should own negative shares in this scheme:D).

Let individuals decide (including in the court of law like in those copyright lawsuits by those few that actually produce valuable content) how theirs is to be used.

I trust Anthropic, heck even Musk, more than I would trust some apparatchik legally empowered to decide for the "people".

by sershe

6/3/2026 at 7:05:27 PM

"No man's life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session." Gideon J. Tucker

by skmurphy

6/3/2026 at 7:29:25 PM

On the flip side, without state protection, no man's life liberty or property would be safe either.

by amanaplanacanal

6/3/2026 at 7:41:47 PM

I agree: a "state of nature" leads to lives that are "nasty, brutish and short." How do we find legislators who are good stewards for the public trust and welfare. We subject public companies to transparency regulations, perhaps legislator would benefit from more transparency. I am not sure where to draw the line to prevent mob rule or other undesirable outcomes, but legislators manage enormous budgets. Arnold Kling looks at ways to reorganize to create tighter accountability in https://arnoldkling.substack.com/p/the-unbalance-of-power

by skmurphy

6/3/2026 at 7:49:09 PM

That's not quite true either. State protection is neither necessary nor sufficient to consistently ensure safety for any particular person or their property. Obviously, there's a sweet spot.

by akramachamarei

6/3/2026 at 9:10:56 PM

Hmmm. Are there stateless areas with consistent safety? Maybe I missed something.

by amanaplanacanal

6/3/2026 at 9:28:26 PM

Um, not that I know of. There probably are some, but very small. Depends on what you mean by area. When I spoke of "not necessary or sufficient", I thought I was careful to quantify that expression over individuals; sharing your original framing "no man's […]". Certainly some people may possess sufficient skill and will and influence and have few enough enemies to be safe for life without a state. And certainly some people possess such great weakness and incompetence and antipathy and have enough enemies that no state could protect them.

Maybe that's a nitpick on your phrasing but I am a licensed Picker of Nits (one who happens to be a minarchist, not an anarchist, for what it's worth.)

by akramachamarei

6/3/2026 at 5:29:31 PM

Why does the public have a right to expropriate the property if AI companies specifically, as opposed to other types of companies? Just make broad rules that apply to everyone based on abstract principles. I’m fine even with very liberal economic approaches. If we want to raise corporate tax rates to 30%, fine, do that. Want to get creative? Half the equity of every company goes into a public fund. But this case by case, “sure is a nice company you got there” stuff is third-world shit.

by rayiner

6/3/2026 at 6:43:26 PM

> Want to get creative? Half the equity of every company goes into a public fund.

Half is far too much but that is an amazing idea. Especially if it is used to reduce income taxes.

by triceratops

6/3/2026 at 6:49:07 PM

No its full blown communist.

by fourseventy

6/3/2026 at 7:02:20 PM

Using "communist" as a pejorative isn't actually an argument for anything.

by pesus

6/3/2026 at 7:57:03 PM

Neither is using "Nazi" as a pejorative, but these kinds of comparisons can be valuable when they identify commonalities between modern proposal and historical approaches to governance that went horribly wrong. (Obviously)

by akramachamarei

6/3/2026 at 6:05:37 PM

The idea is that AI companies expropriated our labor to train their sloppotrons first.

But given that this is Bernie, it's probably a stalking horse for future expropriations from other industries later.

by bitwize

6/3/2026 at 6:25:45 PM

What labor did any of us have to get up and go do for the AI companies?

by csallen

6/3/2026 at 6:55:44 PM

Produced the corpus of knowledge they trained on.

by jst1fthsdys

6/3/2026 at 6:57:01 PM

The fact that somebody benefited from the output of your work is not the same thing as extracting your labor. Extracting your labor means that before you even create the work, they're conscripting you to do it.

For example, I created a useful organization at my school before I graduated. That was twenty years ago. It still exists, and people are still benefiting from it. But they don't somehow owe me compensation, nor would I go around saying that they're somehow exploiting me or expropriating my labor just because they're benefiting from what I've done in the past.

by csallen

6/3/2026 at 7:12:55 PM

This chain has been using expropriate, not extract. Not sure why you mentioned that.

Your story doesn't really relate. I get what you are saying, but your org wasn't copyrighted under you, nor did you expect any monetary returns on it. They stole copyrighted work without permission.

by jst1fthsdys

6/3/2026 at 7:32:45 PM

> This chain has been using expropriate, not extract. Not sure why you mentioned that.

Sure, my bad.

> They stole copyrighted work without permission.

While we're nitpicking language, you can't "steal" copyrighted work. Theft/stealing are crimes that apply to situation where property is taken such that its rightful owner no longer has it. Copyright has nothing to do with theft. There is no taking of property involved. Copyright is a violation of a limited monopoly granted to a person/company to be the only one allowed to make copies.

Anyway, for a more substantive point, I think it remains to be seen that training an intelligence on information is the same thing as violating a copyright. For example, nobody would claim it's a copyright violation for a budding author to train his skills by reading tons of books.

But even setting the law aside, just morally, it doesn't seem like it should be any sort of violation. Of course, many people don't like that AI companies are getting rich, but that should be irrelevant. The fact is that nobody is harmed or deprived. Nobody's work is even redistributed. And prevention is easy -- if you don't want people/companies/AIs/etc learning from the material you put out, then keep it secret.

What seems morally bankrupt to me is this idea that anyone should be entitled to control what others are allowed to learn from. If you put information or work out into the public, that should not make you some sort of God who should control whether other people can learn from it or not.

by csallen

6/3/2026 at 8:03:06 PM

If your product has no value without access by your company/you agents of someone elses work, you are a derivative work. The value of your product has at least in part been derived from other's copyrighted work.

The fact that these companies don't just remove copyrighted work from their product creation chain shows that they feel they are deriving value from the copyrighted works that they wouldn't have if they didn't use copyrighted works.

by _DeadFred_

6/3/2026 at 8:35:28 PM

"Deriving value" from what came before doesn't mean that what came before is owed some sort of check. And thank god, or the world would be a horrible place full of rent seekers.

by csallen

6/5/2026 at 3:45:24 PM

As I stated specifically "If your product has no value without access by your company/you agents of someone elses work"

If THE PRODUCT (not the creators) requires access to someone else's work, to generate it's value it is derivative.'

This is actual law, with actual thought put into it, created over 300 years and is a huge part of what has created the modern world. No one can tell me why this thinking should be suddenly thrown out in a reasoned way that again, addresses the 300 years of things that has gone into this.

by _DeadFred_

6/5/2026 at 5:42:08 PM

[dead]

by csallen

6/3/2026 at 9:45:49 PM

The fact that AI is largely trained on unlicensed IP from the people is probably the single most coherent argument in favor of govt forced socialism on private entities I've probably ever considered. Not that I agree with all of the statements, assertions or point in TFA.

I say this as a conservative leaning libertarian even.

by tracker1

6/3/2026 at 5:27:24 PM

Giving government property rights means taking away your own property rights. It’s zero sum.

by alfiedotwtf

6/3/2026 at 5:41:30 PM

I am willing to surrender some property rights for a functional distributive society, pragmatically.

by trismus

6/3/2026 at 5:45:47 PM

Some.

Most of us are. That's what taxes are, in fact. We have private property rights, and we have to pay taxes. The hard-core anti-tax people try to make that a contradiction; most of the rest of us don't think of it that way, so their "taxation is theft" rhetoric falls flat.

But I think it's important that we keep it at some. Major erosions of private property rights in order "to tax the rich" make me nervous, because I don't want to lose those rights myself. And taking the rights from them, but I get to keep them, seems likely to not be a stable equilibrium.

by AnimalMuppet

6/3/2026 at 10:16:26 PM

That's fine, you can be nervous.

Seems like a slippery slope argument to forestall any practical positive change which doesn't directly immediately benefit you.

What's actually going to happen though, is every principled parasite at the top will fight tooth and nail to protect every principled right they have while for example the health care, infrastructure, and institutions decline, and they will happily support a fascist demagogue rather than give up those rights (on principles of course! Not on pesky reality).

This is not the first time around. Wealth concentrating policies rely on appealing to the middle class' fear that someone, somewhere will get a benefit that I won't. So principled!

And it works.

C.f. the discussion in Australia right now over whether increasing capital gains tax is 'fair'... The right is talking on principles, conveniently ignoring the massive tax breaks and regulatory capture that have resulted in huge measurable increases in wealth concentration, and justifying those spuriously as overall productivity increases. Principles for thee, pragmatism for me.

by trismus

6/3/2026 at 5:32:18 PM

Everybody thinks that they can get the government to take from them, but not from us.

by AnimalMuppet

6/3/2026 at 6:13:37 PM

They're already taking from us, if you work for a paycheck.

by triceratops

6/3/2026 at 5:23:16 PM

Wouldn't taxes give more to the public than nationalization? I'd like the benefits of Communism without the downsides.

There are efficiency benefits to the government owning stock vs. using the IRS for collection, that part I like. But I don't trust the US gov to use stock voting rights wisely.

by axus

6/3/2026 at 6:42:24 PM

> But I don't trust the US gov to use stock voting rights wisely.

What if it got ownership without voting rights?

by triceratops

6/3/2026 at 5:35:35 PM

The public should own half of everything that Senator Sanders owns as well.

by slackfan

6/3/2026 at 5:40:25 PM

Pretty sure he'd be down for that

by trismus

6/3/2026 at 7:19:52 PM

Drop by his residence and ask, why not.

by slackfan

6/3/2026 at 6:30:07 PM

Why? He makes a compelling argument for his stance, and he is of course one man, not a business. If AI companies are going to have such a profound effect on the common man, including both you and me, then why shouldn't we have a say in how they operate? I can hardly say the same for Sanders' belongings.

by skeaker

6/3/2026 at 7:19:28 PM

He's a multimillionaire and I am not.

by slackfan

6/3/2026 at 8:55:36 PM

If your point is that you're trying to parrot Sanders' beliefs in a deliberately stupid way, it isn't working, because this isn't why he thinks the public should have a stake in how AI companies are being run. It's what you think he thinks after not having read the article.

by skeaker

6/3/2026 at 10:55:52 PM

Or maybe I honestly believe that all millionaires should be socially responsible, regardless of their political views.

by slackfan

6/3/2026 at 6:27:18 PM

I think, up until now, no politician has campaigned on the combination of a wealth tax and a significant income tax reduction. Wealth taxes are always proposed as in addition to, rather than a replacement for, income taxes. This makes them an electoral loser. All the temporarily embarrassed millionaires and billionaires come out to rally against the wealth tax.

On the other hand if it put significant money into most people's hands...it's going to be a lot harder to fight.

by triceratops

6/3/2026 at 6:39:40 PM

In general, it seems to me that an abstract resource like AI cannot possibly be regulated. Even if US forced their hand and took ownership of the controlling stakes in the current major AI companies, what stops the other AI companies from raising up and doing whatever they want?

Perhaps the assumption is that these large AI companies need large datacenters to operate and that is how they will be regulated. But what about the datacenters outside the US jurisdiction? And what about local AI?

In the old days, the computers were huge and there was one per city. Now, several decades later, we all have plenty of our own computers. I cannot imagine why the trend would not continue with AI. Over time, it is in my opinion plausible that most of our common needs would be satisfied by local AI running on one's home servers or even phones.

How is that going to be regulated by owning a controlling stake in a few US AI companies?

I do not see into the details of what Mr. Bernie Sanders is suggesting. It seems to me though that his idea of somehow regulating the AI needs further development. Because the currently discussed approaches seem to me like a hot take that has not been thought over very well.

by pbasista

6/3/2026 at 6:42:07 PM

Bernie is a full on communist at this point. Seizing the assets of private companies for the government? WTF.

by fourseventy

6/3/2026 at 7:58:31 PM

> full on communist

Please do not use the term communist lightly, i.e. as an umbrella term for people who express ideas that e.g. more government control or regulation is in some circumstances reasonable.

The only forms of communism that have ever actually materialized in society have all been authoritarian regimes or outright dictatorships. Where the only "truth" is dictated by the governing leader or party. Where you cannot express your opinion freely. Where you cannot e.g. go to a university or have a slightly better job unless you are loyal to the party establishment. Where people are afraid to talk to their neighbors about politics because they cannot know who is going to report them for anti-government opinions. Where people are persecuted, imprisoned or even killed for their opinions.

To the best of my knowledge, Bernie Sanders has never expressed such ideas.

One might argue that here we are talking about the purely academic definition of communism. But unfortunately, in the real world, there is no such thing as academic communism. So far it has always come with the dictatorship and with people who abuse it. Always.

by pbasista

6/3/2026 at 8:29:19 PM

He's advocating for the government seizing ownership of the means of production without compensation. That sounds pretty communist to me.

by sobellian

6/4/2026 at 4:39:08 AM

Do you propose taxpayers to shoulder compensations to AI companies that robbed them of data and jobs? I guess not being absurd is communist now :)

by gettingoverit

6/4/2026 at 1:04:57 PM

I'm not proposing anything. I don't think it's the government's remit to be honest. But government seizing the means of production is literally the definition of communism.

by sobellian

6/4/2026 at 12:01:51 AM

Aaron Swartz died for nothing.

by rho138

6/4/2026 at 3:48:35 AM

This was the first tragedy that came to my mind

by bicepjai

6/3/2026 at 5:28:59 PM

Bernie Sanders. I mean, he's not always wrong, but he's, um, kind of enthusiastic about just taking stuff from those who have it, considerably more than the current understanding of private property (or even taxation) considers acceptable.

by AnimalMuppet

6/3/2026 at 5:35:16 PM

>kind of enthusiastic about just taking stuff from those who have it, considerably more than the current understanding of private property (or even taxation) considers acceptable.

Funny how you can use that description for how AI companies used everything for training data.

by jotux

6/3/2026 at 8:07:29 PM

Can you? If the government decides to take another grand, that's money I can't use. If I publish a blog post about why I hate videogames, and an AI company trains a model on it, I still have my article, I still have the same number of people who could find it and care about it a particular amount. Maybe some of them will forgo reading my article because they got the same thing from the LLM, but the description of these two actions is not nearly the same. This is why intellectual "property" is a metaphor. Economists call this a nonrivalrous good. IP law seeks to make such things more rivalrous, FBOFW.

by akramachamarei

6/3/2026 at 9:00:19 PM

"You wouldn't download a blog post"?

by scottyah

6/3/2026 at 5:33:03 PM

The obvious counterargument is that the AI labs took virtually all human writing, imagery, music, etc., without regard for licensing or copyright. It's fair to ask what they owe back to the commons they built their models on (and which they are in some sense helping to destroy).

by Jordan-117

6/3/2026 at 5:43:54 PM

There were long ancestral lines of humans who were very very keen on not redistributing power for many generations.

They were called kings. Cutting their heads off was the best thing to happen to society, ever.

Take the long view. Our particular economic and ideological moment is not worth defending.

by trismus

6/3/2026 at 5:52:34 PM

This is ahistoric drivel.

China and Russia are simple examples of the fallout of "cutting king's heads".

So awesome in China that they went straight back to a lifetime emperor now.

The French Revolution and its fallout (communism, fascism) killed more humans than any other historic movement, triggering 2 world wars, including numerous genocides.

by shadowtree

6/3/2026 at 7:10:24 PM

Blaming an event that happened in 1789 for the first and second world wars seems incredibly far fetched. Maybe we should blame the aggressors who started the wars.

by snake42

6/3/2026 at 5:32:31 PM

I think the point is that they took our collective knowledge without asking and are selling it back to us. We should own a substantial portion of it.

(Not sure if this is the right approach, but the general idea seems rather important.)

by edbaskerville

6/3/2026 at 5:36:50 PM

Yet progressives say that he would be "moderate" in Europe.

by Aunche

6/3/2026 at 6:12:44 PM

Why listen to US progressives' opinions about Europe? Ask Europeans.

by nyeah

6/3/2026 at 7:05:53 PM

That was then but this is now and now American 'progressives' have caught up and in some cases out-'progressed' their European counterparts. There isn't anything 'moderate' about current American 'progressives'.

by hagbard_c

6/3/2026 at 6:10:13 PM

This would be for the benefit of the political elite, not “the public”.

by jandrewrogers

6/3/2026 at 5:52:07 PM

Can we wait till after the bubble pops and see what pieces are left on the floor?

by taco_emoji

6/3/2026 at 5:34:08 PM

[flagged]

by new_account_104

6/3/2026 at 5:36:18 PM

...just half?

by altruios

6/3/2026 at 5:37:22 PM

If these companies intend to destroy the fabric of society and jobs and livelihood of everyone, then that leaves us very few choices as a society. This is one of the tamest and most peaceful ones, even if it's just a start. Hopefully Sammy and friends choose wisely.

by pesus

6/3/2026 at 5:25:27 PM

I would prefer not to

by jordemort

6/3/2026 at 5:42:16 PM

That is actually not that bad of an idea huh

by 217

6/3/2026 at 5:33:35 PM

Only if it's AGI, which is astronomically impossible.

by feverzsj

6/3/2026 at 5:43:10 PM

I don't think LLMs will be the path to AGI, but anything nature can already build (a human mind) is proven to be possible. After that, it is just a science and engineering problem to replicate.

There are those who believe that a human mind is somehow magic and a special exception to the laws of physics, but I am not one of those people.

by fhdkweig

6/3/2026 at 5:59:50 PM

The public should own 100% of AI companies. Why stop at 50%?

by josefritzishere

6/3/2026 at 5:36:51 PM

The Public Should Own ALL of SpaceX.

by morninglight

6/5/2026 at 8:25:37 PM

With or without paying those who made SpaceX happen?

by Leonard_of_Q

6/3/2026 at 5:41:09 PM

People on HN generally love municipal broadband. For good reasons. It is almost without exception better than any of the national ISPs. Cheaper too.

Municipal broadband is just 100% publicly-owned. That's what that means. When you have a national ISP, you might not get a service at all despite the ISP guaranteeing service in exchange for money from the state they've taken. You get a service that starts at $60 but somehow gets to $140 in a few years unless you do the annual cancel dance and if you do cancel you have no other options anyway. And what are you really paying for? Lobbying to make municipal broadband illegal.

And these same people will defend the status quo because of "property rights". Nobody here is Jeff Bezos. Does it seem like things are going well? Is this a legitimate belief in unfettered property rights? Or is it just that you believe you'll be Jeff Bezos one day so you'll benefit from the status quo?

This is the origin of the quote possibly misattributed to Steinbeck that Americans view themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires".

by jmyeet

6/3/2026 at 8:20:50 PM

Besides economic and historical facts, I think one of the biggest reasons to flee municipal broadband is its liability to become a tool of government repression. What we're essentially proposing is that at the dusk of paper and analog media we want the government to be the provider of information and communication infrastructure.

I'm reminded of a quote from Martin Niemöller.... Perhaps our Constitution would protect us against such things. But why risk it?

by akramachamarei

6/3/2026 at 10:36:55 PM

This is just a slippery slope fallacy and I'm honestly confused as to why it's so sticky. Are we really concerned about possible repression by Marquette, MI? And what would that look like exactly? Also, what are we comparing it to? Social media companies do untold amounts of repression.

My problem with this kind of argument is that it weights future hypothetical harm as more important than documented historical harm. Did we forget how Verizon FIOS throttled Netflix [1]? Also, what examples do we have of any municipal broadband in the US doing any kind of repression?

The truth here is that big companies are more complicit to government intervention than small ones are.

It's an odd quote to bring up because Niemoller was a concentration camp guard turned survivor who was arguing against inaction against the Nazis because it doesn't affect you, against being a bystander basically.

Are we really likening municipal broadband to the Holocaust? Really?

[1]: https://blog.flashrouters.com/2021/07/12/tired-netflix-throt...

by jmyeet

6/4/2026 at 12:50:25 AM

Yes, we should really be concerned about the government repressing internet users on its network. Surely you've noticed the hubbub about age verification recently. Maybe not Marquette, but in other places I certainly would expect the government to try to, for example ban porn under the guise of "protecting kids", or policing "hate speech" under the guise of preventing "incitements to violence". Now, you may not like porn, you may think you don't engage in hate speech, but as in the Niemöller quote, we shouldn't wait for the next disfavoured group to be us. We are I think, thankfully, very far from that, but I don't even want to take steps in that direction.

Maybe this is just a hypothetical future harm. I'm not sure the benefits are any more concrete. After all, if Fios throttles your Netflix, you can (usually) pick another competitor. Would a municipal broadband provider permit competition? Seems unlikely to me, unless the state is willing to forgo the taxes from citizens who go with a private ISP, which I don't think they'd tolerate.

And what if all the ISPs were throttling, i.e. you really had no alternative? I think it's worth asking what economic forces are incentivizing that, and why we think municipal ISPs wouldn't be subject to them? And if they are, who is paying to compensate?

> The truth here is that big companies are more complicit to government intervention than small ones are.

Seems backwards to me. Small company, small litigation warchest. It's "yessir" or we evaporate you. Why do you think it's the other way around?

by akramachamarei

6/3/2026 at 5:53:00 PM

You don’t have to be Jeff Bezos to believe you’re better off in the long run with strong property rights. To your example: I’ve got 10 gig fiber from a private company. My alternatives are 2 gig fiber from a private company, or 2 gig cable from a private company. I don’t have to be Jeff Bezos to wager that, if the people who ran Baltimore City Public Schools ran my broadband service, I wouldn’t have even 1 gig service.

The fact is, we have tried exactly what you’re suggesting. We don’t even need to get to the brutal communism of China or the Soviet Union. The “social democracy” of India and Bangladesh (where I’m from) left those countries’ economies in the toilet.

The best case scenario for social democracy was the DDR. My wife lived for a year in former eastern germany—in 2001, when the socialist government was as far back in time as Obama’s first term is to today—and folks recall being reasonably happy under socialism. But western germany was still much more prosperous, and it took huge solidarity payments to help the former east germany catch up.

by rayiner

6/3/2026 at 7:33:16 PM

I live in a town with municipal power, and the general consensus in the area is that the towns with municipal power are loads better at it than the main private utilities in the area. There's no intrinsic reason why a publicly-owned utility should be better or worse at its job than privately-owned utility.

But to talk about broadband more specifically, one of the main reasons why municipal broadband started becoming a thing was because in many areas, where there is but one (private) broadband provider to choose from, that provider would proceed to refuse to upgrade the infrastructure even when municipalities offered buttloads of cash to pay for the upgrades. So the municipal broadband choice becomes "get municipal broadband at 1 gig, or private company broadband at 25 meg (asymmetric)."

by jcranmer

6/3/2026 at 9:38:21 PM

We flirt with the idea of municipal broadband every couple of years (we built dense fiber connectivity throughout the village a decade or so ago for other reasons). But the economics are brutal; to pencil, you need significant uptake, and you're competing with AT&T and Xfinity, both of which (if you're clear-eyed) are better offerings than the muni can compete with, so you're not going to get that uptake.

The buildout issue is real, and is a reason to explore public-owned broadband in underinvested areas. But even if we had only AT&T here, none of the arguments really work. Even the monopolism concern isn't operative (AT&T and Xfinity don't jack their rates up in places they happen to be the monopoly supplier --- they quote nationally visible rates).

by tptacek

6/3/2026 at 7:39:25 PM

> There's no intrinsic reason why a publicly-owned utility should be better or worse at its job than privately-owned utility.

At scale, why would utilities be different than other government services, such as schools or transit?

I’m sure there are edge cases in parts of the country that are too poor or sparely populated to support a robust private sector. But I don’t live in a place like that, and most people don’t. I live in the suburbs of Annapolis. And I’ve lived in Chicago, Baltimore, New York City, DC, and Wilmington Delaware. Would I rather have Comcast run my internet, or the governments of any of those cities? More to the point: would I want to live in the counterfactual scenario where the 1996 telecom act had gone in a different direction, and those cities had built broadband networks that were now 30 years old in whatever shape they were after decades of maintained by those cities?

My experience with the municipal services these cities do run says “no.” And that conclusion is counter to my ideology. I like public infrastructure. I structured my life around commuting over the DC Metro and Amtrak for years. But, for example, the DC Metro deferred maintenance to such a degree that the automated train control built in the 1970s had to be shut off in 2009. Headways got longer, the ride got much rougher. It stayed that way for fifteen years until they turned ATO back on last year. So in 2026, the big achievement is that we’re back to the ride smoothness we had in 1980.

by rayiner

6/3/2026 at 7:07:43 PM

>I don’t have to be Jeff Bezos to wager that, if the people who ran Baltimore City Public Schools ran my broadband service, I wouldn’t have even 1 gig service.

Pay up. Municipal broadband is objectively better than the other options pretty much everywhere it hasn't been banned.

Municipal broadbands were laying 1 gig fiber service while Spectrum and Comcast were still selling 10mb/s as standard.

by mrguyorama

6/3/2026 at 7:13:23 PM

Municipal broadband has never been banned in Maryland, where I live. Or in New York, Delaware, or Georgia, where I’ve also lived. Where are the great municipal broadband networks in these state?

by rayiner

6/3/2026 at 6:36:00 PM

The "brutal communism of China" is just hilarious on its face. It's like a Freedom House type position [1]. Funded by the State Department btw. I'm sure it's unbiased.

Surveys of Chinese citizens show very high levels of satisfaction with their government [2] while Chinese people view the West through the "kill line" [3]. The funny part about that is the NYT blaming the kill line on "state media" [4] when it originated on Chinese social media. But that's how deep the anti-China propaganda goes in the US. The transformation Chinese people have seen in their daily lives in their lifetimes is something undeniable [5], liting ~800M people out of extreme poverty. What has the West done in that time? Does it seem like things are going well?

So all I did was point out how people like municipal broadband and you went straight to the slippery slope fallacy "but that's communism!" without actually knowing what communism actually is it seems.

The idea is pretty simple. The people should have a stake in the value they create. You know who else believes that? The US Department of Defense [6]. Is the Defense Department "Communist" too?

[1]: https://freedomhouse.org/country/china

[2]: https://ash.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/final_pol...

[3]: https://fpif.org/how-the-kill-line-redefined-the-american-dr...

[4]: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/13/business/china-american-p...

[5]: https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/server/api/core/bitstrea...

[6]: https://investorplace.com/dailylive/2026/06/the-pentagon-is-...

by jmyeet

6/3/2026 at 8:32:27 PM

> liting [sic] ~800M people out of extreme poverty. What has the West done in that time?

Well, producing the demand for those manufacturing jobs, for one thing.

by akramachamarei

6/3/2026 at 7:25:56 PM

You seriously can't expect us westerners to listen to the Chinese people about their government. How can we trust them, they are in a police state with the most imprisoned people, have oppressed, immiserated, and genocided minorities for decades, selectively enforce law for the elite, and are initiating wars of aggression across the globe. You can't trust anything coming out of a brutal regime like that.

Err, wait a minute...

by jst1fthsdys

6/3/2026 at 7:41:29 PM

I’m quite impressed by China’s current authoritarian capitalist system. I was talking about the brutality and incompetence of China’s Maoist communism.

Ironically, China proves that “democratic socialism” is exactly the wrong thing for a developing country. Democracy is optional for a developing country, but capitalism is indispensable.

by rayiner

6/4/2026 at 2:57:49 AM

[dead]

by asgeesg