Illustration: Álvaro Bernis
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T HE artificial-intelligence boom has minted vast fortunes. Jensen Huang’s stake of nearly 4% in Nvidia, the chipmaker he co-founded in 1993, is worth 1trn, more than doubled the estimated wealth of its boss, Dario Amodei. Yet as new plutocrats gain riches, most Americans doubt the gains from AI will be widely shared. Less than one in three think the technology will make ordinary people richer.
Populists on left and right are scrambling for an answer. On June 5th Donald Trump appeared to endorse a proposal, championed by Sam Altman of Open AI, under which AI firms would voluntarily contribute equity to a public wealth fund, with the returns eventually flowing to households. “It almost becomes a partnership with the American public,” Mr Trump declared. “It would make ’em rich.” Bernie Sanders, a leftie senator, wants a one-off 50% tax on AI firms’ value, paid in stock, to give Americans a “direct ownership stake”. Mr Amodei has floated the idea of “universal capital accounts”. These proposals reflect a growing belief that if AI generates extraordinary wealth, the public should share in it.
Beneath the populist packaging lies a serious idea. Wealth in America is already concentrated: the top 1% own nearly a third of it and the bottom half just 2.5%. If AI substantially raises the returns to capital relative to labour, that divide could widen; superintelligence, if it materialises, could make much human labour obsolete, leaving the gains to whoever owns the machines. In such a future, giving the public a stake starts to look prudent.
In one sense, citizens already have a claim on AI success. Governments tax corporate profits, which is an efficient way of sharing in firms’ upside without picking winners or exposing taxpayers to losses. The case for AI wealth funds is therefore in part political. Direct ownership stakes make the gains from AI more visible, while providing insurance against a future in which a handful of firms capture an ever-larger share of economic activity.
Still, pursuing that goal raises practical questions. The first is how the assets get into public hands. Mr Altman has proposed voluntary donations, but the mechanics are tricky. Newly issued shares would dilute existing investors—including, in Open AI ’s case, Microsoft—who may object; Mr Altman himself owns no equity in his firm, so he has no founder stake to donate. As the AI labs prepare to go public, such dilution would soon hit pension funds and retail investors, too. Voluntary schemes can be meaningful or painless, not both. If governments buy stakes directly, that would put taxpayers on the hook for loss-making firms at frothy valuations. Mr Sanders’s approach—forcing firms to transfer equity—would raise more money but would be hard to distinguish from expropriation, inviting legal battles and chilling investment by reducing the expected rewards of future success.
The next question is how much the schemes would raise. Suppose Open AI and Anthropic each gave 3% of their equity, the midpoint of the 1-5% range discussed by industry advocates. At current valuations, that would seed a fund of 140bn or so after a decade. Paying out 4% annually, a rule of thumb for preserving a fund in perpetuity, would amount to $20 a year per American annually. To be sure, the point of such schemes is that AI may prove anything but ordinary. Yet even if it does change everything, the firms’ combined value rises ten- or 20-fold and the state picks the right winners, Americans would get a yearly payout of a few hundred dollars. This is not enough to make anyone rich.
Since it is anyway unclear where AI ’s rents will ultimately accrue, this argues for looking across the industry. An annual levy of 0.2% of market value, along the lines proposed by some advocates of a broad wealth tax, could raise roughly $40bn a year at the current valuations of AI labs, chipmakers and cloud providers. But deciding what counts as an AI firm—and how much of Amazon, Google or SpaceX does—would be contentious. And the resulting dividend would still be at best a few hundred dollars per American annually. A nice bung—but well short of a universal basic income or meaningful insurance against widespread job displacement.
Disbursing the proceeds involves more choices. One model is Norway’s oil fund, whose returns help fund public services. Another is Alaska’s Permanent Fund, which invests the state’s resource revenues on behalf of residents and pays them annual dividends (similar to what Open AI and Anthropic have proposed and we assumed in our calculations above). A third is something akin to the “Trump accounts” the president has proposed for American tots. These would be seeded by the state, compound over time and be used to fund college or a pension, say. The left may prefer the Norwegian way. Mr Trump would favour one of the other two.
Command-Shift-Control
Public ownership carries risks. It blurs the line between regulator and shareholder. Politicians may be unwilling to pursue antitrust action or impose costly safety rules on publicly owned firms, and happy to prop up stumbling ones (and their valuations). This may entrench incumbents and weaken competition. AI rents may also flow somewhere unexpected: electricity transformed society, but a wealth fund built around electric utilities would be a dud.
The best way to minimise such downsides may be a public wealth fund invested in a broad equity index. The capital could come from taxes on AI profits or mandatory equity contributions from across the AI economy—which, if the optimists are right, may one day mean most business. Even extraordinary returns would still probably translate into a modest dividend, arriving years from now. The harder questions—how to tax AI, how to regulate it and how to support displaced workers—would remain.■
논증 분석
유형: diagnosis
핵심 주장
AI 부의 공공 공유 제안들은 정치적 매력에도 불구하고 현실적으로 지급액이 미미하며, 가장 현실적인 대안은 광범위한 주식 인덱스에 투자하는 공공 자산 펀드이지만 핵심 과제들은 여전히 남는다.
논리구조
- 전제: AI 붐이 Jensen Huang, Dario Amodei 등 극소수에게 막대한 부를 창출하는 반면, 미국인의 3분의 2 이상은 AI의 혜택이 일반인에게 돌아오지 않을 것이라고 생각한다.
- 논거: Donald Trump, Sam Altman, Bernie Sanders, Dario Amodei 등 좌우 포퓰리스트 모두 AI 부를 공유하기 위한 공공 자산 펀드 또는 주식 배분 방안을 제안하고 있다.
- 진단: 미국의 부는 이미 극도로 집중되어 있으며(상위 1%가 전체의 1/3 보유), AI가 노동 대비 자본 수익률을 더욱 높인다면 불평등은 심화될 수 있어 공공의 지분 확보는 합리적 보험이 된다.
- 논거: 시민들은 이미 법인세를 통해 AI 성공에 간접적으로 참여하고 있으며, AI 자산 펀드의 핵심 가치는 경제적 효율보다 이익을 가시화하고 소수 기업의 독점에 대한 보험을 제공하는 정치적 명분에 있다.
- 반론: 자산을 공공으로 이전하는 방식에는 실질적 문제가 따른다: 자발적 기부(Sam Altman 방식)는 기존 투자자(Microsoft 포함) 지분 희석 문제를 낳고, 정부의 직접 매입은 납세자 손실 위험을, Bernie Sanders의 강제 이전 방식은 사실상 수용에 가까워 투자 위축과 법적 분쟁을 초래할 수 있다.
- 진단: 수치로 따져보면, OpenAI와 Anthropic이 각 3% 지분을 출연해도 10년 후 연간 지급액은 1인당 약 20달러에 불과하며, AI 가치가 10~20배 폭등해도 연간 수백 달러 수준으로 ‘부자가 되기에는 턱없이 부족’하다.
- 진단: AI 기업에 연 0.2% 부과세를 매기는 광범위한 방식도 연간 약 400억 달러를 조성할 수 있으나, ‘AI 기업’의 정의 문제(Amazon, Google, SpaceX 등 포함 여부)가 논쟁적이며 1인당 배당은 여전히 수백 달러 수준에 그친다.
- 논거: 배분 모델로는 Norway의 석유 펀드(공공 서비스 재원), Alaska Permanent Fund(개인 배당), Donald Trump의 ‘Trump accounts’(아동 계좌 적립) 등 세 가지가 있으며 각각 정치적 선호에 따라 다르다.
- 반론: 공공 소유는 규제기관과 주주 역할의 혼동, 반독점 조치 약화, 부실 기업 지원, 경쟁 위축 등의 리스크를 수반하며, AI 렌트가 예상치 못한 분야(과거 전기처럼)로 흘러갈 경우 펀드는 실패할 수 있다.
- 처방: 이러한 부작용을 최소화하려면 AI 이익세나 AI 전반의 의무적 주식 출연을 재원으로 삼아 광범위한 주식 인덱스에 투자하는 공공 자산 펀드가 최선이나, AI 과세·규제·일자리 대체 노동자 지원 등 더 어려운 문제들은 여전히 해결되지 않는다.
결론
AI 부의 공공 공유를 위한 자산 펀드는 정치적 정당성은 있으나 현실적 지급 효과가 미미하며, 광범위한 인덱스 투자 방식이 그나마 최선이지만 AI 시대의 근본적 과제들—과세, 규제, 노동자 보호—은 별도로 해결해야 한다.
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