Sanders Wants to Take Half of OpenAI. The Company Already Wrote the Blueprint.
Senator Bernie Sanders wants the federal government to take half of OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI before they go public. The timing is deliberate.
Sanders introduced legislation on June 1 that would force the largest AI companies in America to hand over 50 percent of their equity to a newly created sovereign wealth fund — a one-time tax paid in stock, not cash, giving the government voting shares and board representation at each firm. The prospect of a government co-owner with blocking power is a direct complication for how those offerings get priced and structured, right now.
The same people who track IPO pipelines for a living have noticed. AI labs are positioning for the largest public offerings in technology history, with Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX — which recently merged with xAI — all preparing IPOs this year, according to people familiar with the planning. A mandatory 50 percent equity transfer before listing is not a variable any Wall Street model has had to price before. The offering structure that normally maximizes shareholder value — free float, distributed ownership, clear governance — runs directly into a statutory co-owner who holds a supermajority block and board seats by operation of law, not negotiation.
Sanders is not starting from scratch. Trump signed an executive order proposing an American sovereign wealth fund in February 2025, but that version identified no funding source and named no target companies. Sanders's bill is different: the equity transfer itself is the funding mechanism. He is not asking Congress to write a check. He is demanding the stock.
The mechanism raises immediate structural questions that have no clean answers in existing securities law. At an IPO, share price is set against projected earnings and market demand. A mandatory 50 percent equity transfer before the offering would dilute all existing shareholders proportionally — and a government block with voting rights and board representation would hold a supermajority on any matter requiring a shareholder vote. One question that applies to every underwriter working through the scenario: how do you price an offering when the largest single shareholder is a domestic government entity with potential regulatory conflicts? The question is structural, not political. It does not resolve by changing who occupies the White House.
Sanders has acknowledged the proposal is still being written. OpenAI is not profitable — it has operated at a loss for most of its existence, and a sovereign wealth fund built on equity in companies that are not generating dividends does not immediately generate returns. Sanders has not addressed what the fund looks like if the AI sector's financial trajectory does not match projections. Separately, the scope question remains open: Microsoft, Google, and Amazon all have major AI operations, and it is unclear whether or how companies where AI is only part of the business would fall under the legislation.
The senator, the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, framed the legislation as a response to a fundamental unfairness: AI models were built on the accumulated knowledge, creativity, and labor of the American public, generally without their permission or compensation. He pointed to Norway's sovereign wealth fund, seeded from oil revenues and now worth more than $2 trillion, and Alaska's Permanent Fund, which has paid annual dividends to residents for roughly 50 years, as working models. OpenAI made a conceptually similar proposal in an April 2026 whitepaper — "Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age" — that included a passage calling for a public wealth fund giving every citizen a stake in AI-driven growth, including those not invested in financial markets. When Sanders published his op-ed in the New York Times on June 1, he was introducing the industry's own idea, rewritten to his specifications.
Constitutional law scholars have flagged the Fifth Amendment takings clause as the central legal vulnerability. Forced equity transfers structured as taxes rather than direct seizures occupy theoretically available but practically untested ground under current precedent — the legislative path is also narrow: Republicans control the Senate, and the White House has not signaled support for Sanders's approach. A transfer of this magnitude would almost certainly face litigation if the legislation advanced far enough to reach it.
The broader policy debate is not going away. OpenAI acknowledged in its whitepaper that AI-driven growth could hollow out the tax base funding Social Security, Medicaid, and housing assistance as corporate profits expand and reliance on labor income shrinks. The company proposed shifting the tax burden from labor to capital. Sanders is essentially proposing the same mechanism, at 50 percent. Endorsing the concept in the abstract and accepting a 50 percent equity transfer are very different things — a distinction the industry has not always been clear about.
For now, the IPO pipelines at the major labs remain the most immediate pressure point. The prospect of a government co-owner with blocking power creates a direct complication for how those offerings get priced — the equity transfer mechanism, voting shares, and board representation are all variables that did not exist in any prior technology IPO. Whether the bill has any legislative future is a separate question from whether it is shaping behavior right now. In Silicon Valley, the threat of a regulation can matter as much as the regulation itself.