Nathaniel Whittemore

Referencing the Alaska oil fund, Sanders suggested that the fund should begin by making direct dividend payments to U.S.

citizens and then later be used to fund a, quote, decent and dignified standard of living, including healthcare, education, and housing.

Now, I think when it comes to this type of policy, you have to look at it in a few ways.

First of all, I don't think that Bernie Sanders is particularly in the business of the Trumpian art of the deal, where he's just trying to start the negotiations really high so that he can get a compromise at a lower part.

In other words, I think that this 50% number is the number that he thinks is fair.

I also think that while the government expropriating 50% of the stock of a set of extremely important private companies might have been anathema in previous periods, right now in our times, with discontent where it is, all bets are off on what the public will tolerate.

Still, I think that practically, the idea of AI as a public good is one that might find some political resonance.

For one thing, this is part of the discourse coming out of the labs.

OpenAI's April white paper on industrial policy called for a quote, last October, Anthropic wrote,

Sovereign wealth funds could enable states to acquire positions in AI-related assets.

In scenarios where the AI sector captures an outsized share of economic wealth, government investment could both shape the sector's behavior and AI-derived wealth more equitably.

I think there's also an emerging strand of the discourse that's going to be a lot more politically palatable for folks that's still exploring some similar themes.

That idea, as captured in a recent Ezra Klein op-ed, is about how to distribute AI itself, not just the financial benefits from AI, but AI itself as a public good.

Klein writes, AI's benefits will not emerge automatically or inevitably.

It will take work to identify the problems AI can help the public solve and create the data financing and compute needed to actually solve them.

A public agenda for AI needs to be more than a vague intention to toss AI at public problems.

It starts with access, but it does not end there.

He concludes, If we want an AI that serves the public good, we need to define the public goods that AI can serve and create the conditions under which AI can be useful.

We know we fear what AI will do to us, but what do we hope it will do for us?

I don't think it's an accident that the market discourse and IPO questions are happening at the same time as this growing public policy discourse.