69% of U.S. Workers Want an AI Wealth Fund

Workers want a cut. The number is 69%.

A Verasight survey of 1,690 adults, conducted in June and published this month, found that 69% of Americans support “forcing” AI firms to transfer 50% of their stock to a public sovereign wealth fund. That figure is not a fringe position. It is a majority across a national sample, and it tells you something about where public tolerance for AI-era wealth concentration currently sits.

“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,” said Benjamin Leff, Verasight’s chief executive.

The Political Bid Behind the Poll

Senator Bernie Sanders has already put legislation on the table. His American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, proposed in June, would give the public a 50% stake in the largest AI companies in the U.S. Sanders framed it directly: the bill would “guarantee that the economic benefits generated by AI are used to improve the lives of all of us — not simply to make the richest people in the world even richer.”

The timing is deliberate. Tech layoffs are accelerating even as corporate profits rise, and the gap between those two trends is politically combustible.

What Goldman’s Numbers Imply

Goldman Sachs Senior Global Economist Joseph Briggs estimates that more than 9% of the U.S. labor force — roughly 15 million workers — could lose their jobs during a 10-year AI transition. Briggs compares the shock to the automation and reallocation wave of the late 1990s and early 2000s. His longer-run view is that AI will create new jobs over time, but that is a forecast, not a guarantee, and workers pricing near-term displacement are not being irrational.

The political math here is straightforward. Fifteen million potential job losses concentrated in a visible sector, combined with capital expenditure flowing toward AI infrastructure, produces exactly the grievance a sovereign wealth fund proposal is designed to address.

What the Market Is Not Pricing

Sovereign wealth funds can take equity stakes in AI companies, fund capital-intensive infrastructure, and capture AI-driven gains for a public treasury, according to research firm Windfall Trust. They can also create governance headaches, caught between public-good mandates and the competitive pace of AI development.

The equity markets are currently pricing AI as a corporate profit story. The survey data suggests the public is pricing it as a redistribution question. Those two frames are on a collision course, and legislation like Sanders’s bill is how that collision eventually arrives on a balance sheet.

This article is for information only and is not financial or investment advice. Markets are volatile and you can lose money. Do your own research and consider speaking with a licensed financial advisor before making any decision.