Nearly 7 in 10 Americans Say AI Companies Should Hand Over Half Their Shares

The tech industry has a strange contradiction right now: companies keep posting record profits, yet layoffs keep coming. A growing number of Americans think the solution is to make AI companies share ownership with the public — and they’re surprisingly serious about it.

Market research firm Verasight surveyed 1,690 American adults in June. The results, published this month, show 69% of respondents support “mandating” AI companies to transfer 50% of their shares into a public sovereign wealth fund. That’s not a hypothetical question — Senator Bernie Sanders introduced the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act in June. If passed, the public would hold a 50% equity stake in the largest US AI companies.

Verasight CEO Benjamin Leff put it plainly: “In the public’s view, an AI sovereign wealth fund is a tool that can redistribute the profits created by the AI industry back to the whole of society.”

Sanders went further in a statement last month. “This would ensure that the economic gains from AI go toward improving the lives of all Americans, not just making the wealthiest people in the world even richer,” he said. He also argued that “the future of AI — and the fate of humanity — should not be decided behind closed doors by a handful of Silicon Valley billionaires seeking to maximize power and profit.”

The survey taps into real anxiety. US tech sector layoffs have mounted steadily, and job security feels shaky even at profitable companies. Meanwhile, the same firms are pumping billions into AI infrastructure. Goldman Sachs senior global economist Joseph Briggs estimated in a June report that more than 9% of the workforce — roughly 15 million people — could lose their jobs during the AI transition over the next decade. Briggs compared it to the automation and labor reallocation shocks of the late 1990s and early 2000s, when entire job categories shifted or disappeared.

Windfall Trust, a research organization tracking sovereign wealth funds, outlined how such a fund could work in the AI era: financing capital-intensive AI infrastructure, holding equity in AI companies, and channeling some of the economic gains back into public finances. But the group also flagged real challenges. An AI sovereign wealth fund would have to balance public interest against global AI competition. More critically, it would face a dual mandate — maximize returns for the public on one hand, and advance national strategic goals like building domestic AI capability on the other. Those two goals can conflict directly, especially when investing in overseas AI companies would deliver higher returns than domestic ones.

The tension is real. If a US sovereign wealth fund’s mandate is to maximize public returns, it might end up investing in Chinese or European AI firms instead of American ones. If its mandate prioritizes national competitiveness, it might lock capital into lower-yielding domestic bets. There’s no clean answer yet.

What’s clear: the idea has crossed from fringe to mainstream. Two-thirds of Americans want a piece of the AI boom — and they want it written into law.