The poll says support barely dips when the plan carries Bernie Sanders’ name
Sixty-nine percent of Americans back forcing artificial intelligence firms to hand half their stock to a public sovereign wealth fund, a June survey found, as the Trump administration weighs taking direct equity stakes across the sector.
The nationwide poll by research firm Verasight showed support barely moved when the idea was named after its main backer, dipping to 64 percent when tied to Senator Bernie Sanders.
Verasight said 89 percent of respondents want AI companies to publicly disclose the results of internal safety testing, and 81 percent would let the federal government block the release of any system it judges risky.
“In the eyes of the public, AI Sovereign funds are seen as a tool to distribute the gains from the AI industry back to broader society,” Benjamin Leff, Verasight’s chief executive, told CNBC.
Over the past year the Trump administration has acquired equity stakes in more than two dozen firms spanning semiconductors, nuclear energy, minerals, quantum computers and steel, The New York Times reported, and AI executives are increasingly asking whether they are next.
Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, has floated giving the government equity, including in Washington meetings last month and Trump has publicly raised the same prospect.
The administration has not settled on a formal plan, the Times reported, though officials have discussed taking direct stakes in AI companies or using their equity to seed new Trump investment accounts for children, according to people familiar with the talks.
Where it has already taken shares, the administration holds a portfolio worth billions of US dollars across the Pentagon, the Department of Commerce and the Department of Energy.
Anthropic and OpenAI have both publicly discussed sharing AI wealth directly with taxpayers, modelled on the Alaska Permanent Fund, which invests oil revenue and pays residents a dividend.
The Times reported growing unease over the pressure such a tie could exert, noting the administration has taken a heavier hand in regulating Anthropic in recent weeks.
Some executives worry about simply handing shares to the administration with no clear route for the wealth to reach ordinary Americans.
Sanders introduced the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act in June, which would give the public a 50 percent stake in the largest US AI companies.
“The future of AI and the fate of humanity must not be decided behind closed doors in Silicon Valley by billionaires seeking to maximize their power and profit,” the senator said in a statement.
Distrust of industry self-regulation runs through the data.
Verasight found 43 percent of Americans believe rules proposed by AI firms are designed to benefit the companies rather than the public, and only 30 percent trust the US government more than leading developers such as Anthropic to judge whether a model is safe to deploy.
“The findings from our latest survey demonstrate a rare instance of bipartisan agreement,” Leff said in a statement.
Frustration has grown alongside rising tech layoffs even as overall corporate profits climb, CNBC reported.
Goldman Sachs senior global economist Joseph Briggs estimates more than 9 percent of the labour force, roughly 15m workers, could lose jobs during a 10-year AI transition, the bank said in a report last month.
That “would be the type of automation and reallocation shock that we saw in the late ’90s and early 2000s and in other periods of significant technological change,” Briggs said, though the report argues the losses will prove temporary as AI creates new roles.
Sovereign wealth funds can fund AI infrastructure, take equity in AI companies and channel a share of the gains to the public treasury, according to research firm Windfall Trust.
The firm cautioned that a fund faces a built-in conflict between maximizing returns for citizens and building national AI capacity, since the best financial bet may be a foreign company rather than a domestic one.
