{"id":3908,"date":"2026-07-30T13:01:58","date_gmt":"2026-07-30T16:01:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/glgov.org\/?p=3908"},"modified":"2026-07-30T13:35:06","modified_gmt":"2026-07-30T16:35:06","slug":"ai-needs-its-own-sovereign-fund","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glgov.org\/?p=3908","title":{"rendered":"AI needs its own sovereign fund"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Sam Altman may just be beating lawmakers at their own game. Reports the chief executive of OpenAI is discussing giving a five per cent stake in the ChatGPT maker to the US government suggest an AI sovereign wealth fund is not out of reach. After all, having the world\u2019s best-known AI lab on board gives the concept a huge credibility boost.<\/p>

Details of Altman\u2019s proposal are thin, but should be viewed as a counter-offer to Bernie Sanders\u2019 proposal in June. The senator wants to capture AI-generated wealth, on behalf of the public through a mandatory 50 per cent stock transfer from the largest frontier AI companies into a federally controlled trust. He estimates the vehicle would be worth $7tn at current valuations \u2014 making it large enough to pay every American roughly $1,000 a year from a 5 per cent dividend.<\/p>

Altman\u2019s alternative is well timed. While Sanders\u2019 plan gets the AI wealth diagnosis right, it gets the prescription wrong.<\/p>

Correct diagnosis<\/h2>

Critics assert that AI is the product of human ingenuity and private investment, not a passive resource sitting in the ground waiting to be taxed. They are right that the latter analogy is imperfect. But a meaningful share of the wealth generated by AI should probably become public capital.<\/p>

Sanders argues AI is trained on a public resource more valuable than oil \u2014 the knowledge and labour of humanity, continuously renewed by the data billions of people generate every day.<\/p>

What\u2019s more, the energy needed for its build-out \u2014 which is the foundation of Nvidia CEO\u00a0Jensen Huang\u2019s five-layer AI stack<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 is being co-ordinated at the state level on both sides of the Pacific.<\/p>

If the [energy] layer of the AI stack already warrants sovereign co-ordination, the wealth generated above it deserves the same logic<\/q><\/div>

America\u2019s AI Action Plan<\/a>\u00a0seeks a major expansion of power generation while China\u2019s new Rmb2tn ($294bn) sovereign bond-financed compute network foresees\u00a0huge grid upgrades<\/a>. If the base layer of the AI stack already warrants sovereign co-ordination, the wealth generated above it deserves the same logic.<\/p>

Yet the country in the middle of the stack \u2014 South Korea with its memory chips and semiconductor substrate \u2014 offers a valuable lesson about resisting the temptation to treat a structural technology supercycle like a depleting oil well, to be tapped for citizens\u2019 cash.<\/p>

On May 12, presidential policy chief Kim Yong-beom posted on Facebook that excess tax revenue from the country\u2019s AI and semiconductor boom should fund a \u201ccitizen\u2019s dividend\u201d. The Korea Composite Stock Price Index (Kospi) fell 5.1 per cent intraday, before recovering. A rival presidential aide labelled the idea \u201cextremely dangerous and irresponsible\u201d and Nobel laureate Peter Howitt called it \u201cpremature\u201d.<\/p>