(Just The News)—A U.S. Senate bill would give the federal government a 50% ownership stake in the largest artificial intelligence companies, creating a sovereign wealth fund its sponsor estimates would be worth $7 trillion.
One policy analyst called the idea “nutty” while others said it would put American AI companies at a combative disadvantage and would lead to offshoring.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., introduced the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, which would impose a one-time 50% tax on AI company stock and deposit those shares into a fund that could pay every American more than $1,000 annually.
Sanders said AI was built on “the collective knowledge of humanity and the creative work of tens of millions of people” and that the public deserves a direct ownership stake in the companies that have profited from it.
The fund would be managed by a seven-member independent commission, nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate, with authority to use its voting shares to block corporate decisions it determines hurt the American people.
The bill would also require large companies that operate both AI and non-AI businesses to separate those operations, with the public receiving an ownership stake in the AI side.
The bill would apply to AI companies with at least $200 million in annual revenue, and any new company that reaches that threshold would also be subject to the stock transfer. OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and Google each reported well over $200 million in AI-related revenue in 2025, according to public financial reports and company statements.
The largest AI companies named in the legislation did not respond to questions about how the bill would affect their operations by deadline.
The bill had not been assigned a number or referred to committee as of Friday afternoon. No cosponsors were listed.
Sanders said his proposal goes further than what President Donald Trump or AI company executives have suggested, describing their approach as offering “5% of our profits back into the government” rather than direct public ownership.
Trump said June 5 that a government stake in AI firms could be “a partnership with the American public” and that his administration would “look into” the concept.
Trump signed an executive order in February 2025 directing his administration to develop a plan for a sovereign wealth fund, though no fund has been established.
OpenAI proposed in its April policy paper “Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age” a public wealth fund that would provide every citizen “a stake in AI-driven economic growth.” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote recently that universal basic income “could be financed through taxes on relevant companies.”
Elon Musk, owner of xAI, said in an April post on X that “universal HIGH INCOME via checks issued by the Federal government is the best way to deal with unemployment caused by AI.”
Sanders estimates the fund would be worth about $7 trillion at current valuations. A 5% annual dividend could generate direct payments of more than $1,000 to every American – about $1,045 per person, based on 5% of the estimated $7 trillion fund divided by the current U.S. population – with additional gains directed toward health care, education and housing. If AI company valuations decline, Sanders said, the companies would bear the losses, not the federal government.
Sanders said the bill would ensure AI wealth benefits the public rather than shareholders.
Senate Banking Committee Chairman Tim Scott, R-S.C., said in opening remarks at a June 11 Banking Committee hearing on AI that the committee’s primary objectives are “protecting consumers and American workers, supporting domestic innovation, and ensuring that AI technology is developed by American companies with American values rather than ceding leadership to China.”
Scott’s office and Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Cruz, R-Texas, did not respond to requests for comment by deadline.
Tad DeHaven, a Cato Institute policy analyst who studies government taxation and spending, wrote this month that Sanders “wants political control” over AI companies through voting shares and board representation, and warned that Trump’s own pursuit of government equity stakes in private companies had “opened the door” for the Sanders proposal.
Phillip Magness, an Independent Institute economist who studies taxation and capital markets, said the one-time stock transfer carries its own capital flight risks.
“Since the tech industry tends to be highly mobile and under intense competition from abroad, a tax of this type could trigger offshoring to reduce the tax burden, or could place AI companies that remain in the U.S. at a competitive disadvantage against the rest of the world,” he told The Center Square.
“Legislators seeking to justify new and expansive forms of taxation almost always overestimate their ability to raise revenue,” he said. “Sanders is likely basing his AI company tax proposal on current market valuations, which would also be adversely affected by the implementation of the same measure.”
Bruce Schneier, a Harvard fellow and security technologist who has written extensively on AI policy and technology governance, called the approach “absolutely nutty,” saying the bill would not achieve Sanders’ goal of democratic control over AI development.
“Control will be maintained by the tech oligarchs,” Schneier told The Center Square. “The only difference is that the government will now have a conflict of interest when it comes time to regulate them.”
Schneier said the better approach is to tax AI companies directly to return profits to the public, and separately create a government-run public AI option that operates outside the for-profit market.
“Let government do what it does best, and create a thing that lives outside of the for-profit market system,” he told The Center Square. “The goal here isn’t to replace corporate AI, but to provide an alternative.”
California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Executive Order N-6-26 in May directing state agencies to evaluate policies to address AI-related job losses, including whether residents should receive direct ownership stakes in companies or funds generating AI-driven income.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
