OpenAI Wants a Public Wealth Fund. Fine. But Who Gets to Price the Wealth?

Did you see the Open AI paper: Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age. It calls for the “Public Wealth Fund” which is a Universal Basic Income structure.

I have published two working papers on the question too many people in the AI economy still want to walk around: how do we calculate the value of human input before the winners of this new age decide what the public is “owed”?

The first paper, The Informational Factor of Production and the Systematic Mispricing of Personal Data Inputs , makes the basic case that personal data is not some ghost floating above the economy. It is an input. It belongs in the production function. The second, Beyond Informational Stock: Collective Readiness, Founder Residuals, and the Misallocation of Value in AI-Era Production , pushes further and argues that even where informational value is acknowledged, too much of the reward is still assigned to founders, firms, and legal shells, while the broader public conditions that made that value possible remain undercounted or ignored.

Paper 1

[PAPER 1: The Informational Factor of Production and the Systematic Mispricing of Personal Data Inputs ]

Paper 2

[PAPER 2: Beyond Informational Stock: Collective Readiness, Founder Residuals, and the Misallocation of Value in AI-Era Production ]

These papers come ahead of my forthcoming book, Your Data Their Wealth: The Price of Human Input to the AI Economy , to be published June 19, because the old lie is wearing thin.

The old lie says wealth in the AI era comes from code, capital, and genius.

The truth is plainer than that.

The people are in the machine. The crowd is in the code. The public is in the product.

And now even OpenAI, in its new industrial policy paper, is inching toward admitting it. On page 7, OpenAI calls for a “Public Wealth Fund” so that every citizen, including those not already invested in financial markets, can have a stake in AI-driven economic growth. It says policymakers and AI companies should determine how to seed such a fund, invest it in long-term assets tied to AI companies and adopting firms, and distribute the returns directly to citizens.

That is not nothing.

It is an admission.

An admission that the public is in the value chain.

An admission that AI wealth is not arriving by immaculate conception.

An admission that the fortunes being built in this age are not purely private miracles.

Fine. Good. Let us start there.

But let us not stop there.

Because a Public Wealth Fund without an independent institution to price the human contribution is not justice. It is discretion. It is still the same old arrangement: the people help build the wealth, the powerful name the price, and then the people are handed back a portion of what they were never allowed to measure.

That is not ownership.

That is an allowance.

And I am not talking about allowances. I am talking about accounting.

This is where the AI debate is still soft. Too soft. Everybody wants to talk about safety, innovation, national competition, and economic growth. Everybody wants to sound responsible while avoiding the oldest question in political economy: