The Survey Results

In June, Verasight conducted a nationwide survey of 1,690 adults, released this month. Benjamin Leff, Verasight's CEO, remarked, "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."

The Proposed Bill

Sanders said: "It 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."

He added: "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."

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The Economic Impact

The Goldman Sachs report also says: "But [Briggs] believes these losses will prove temporary owing to his expectation that AI will create many new jobs over the long term even as it destroys existing ones."

The wave of tech layoffs has already hit workers at major companies like Google, Microsoft, and Meta, with thousands of jobs eliminated even as those firms invest billions in AI. Polling data suggests that this tension between corporate profits and workforce displacement is driving public support for the sovereign wealth fund idea.

Windfall Trust, a research group, noted that sovereign wealth funds can serve multiple purposes in AI: they can guide national strategy by funding capital-intensive infrastructure, take stakes in AI companies, and reserve part of the industry's economic gains for public treasuries.

Nevertheless, these funds may struggle to balance serving the public interest with the competitive global push to advance AI capabilities. Windfall Trust added: "There is also a tension between the financial mandate (maximize returns for citizens) and the strategic mandate (build national AI capacity, maintain influence over frontier systems), since these objectives can conflict when the best financial investment is a foreign AI company rather than a domestic one."

This balancing act mirrors earlier automation shocks. During the dot-com boom and bust of the late 1990s, millions of workers in sectors like retail and manufacturing lost jobs to automation and digitization, but eventually new roles in e-commerce and software development emerged. Proponents argue a similar adjustment is possible, but critics warn that the pace of AI disruption may outpace the creation of new job categories, making a compensation mechanism like a sovereign wealth fund essential to cushion the transition.

The push for an AI sovereign wealth fund comes amid a backdrop of rising inequality and job displacement fears. While tech giants have poured billions into AI development, they have simultaneously cut thousands of jobs, fueling public skepticism about the distribution of AI's economic benefits. Proponents argue that a sovereign wealth fund would ensure that the windfall from AI productivity gains is shared broadly, rather than concentrated among a handful of corporate executives and shareholders.

Another important context is the precedent set by other nations. Countries like Norway and Saudi Arabia have long operated sovereign wealth funds from natural resource revenues, demonstrating how a public trust can manage concentrated wealth for long-term societal benefit. An AI-focused fund would similarly capture value from a fast-growing sector, though its primary capital would come from equity stakes in private companies rather than commodity sales. This model could help address the structural inequality that many economists warn will worsen as automation expands, particularly for workers in routine cognitive and manual jobs.

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