Response to Bernie Sanders: A.I. Is a Public Resource.

Over the past week, a surprising number of people have reached out to me asking what I thought about Senator Bernie Sanders’s (June 1, 2026) argument that the public should own a significant share of the wealth created by artificial intelligence. I intended to respond sooner, but life, work, and the realities of building institutions often get in the way of writing about them. The delay may have been useful. The more I reflected on Sanders’s argument, the more I realized that I agree with his diagnosis far more than his prescription. He is absolutely right that AI has been built from humanity’s collective contributions and that a handful of corporations should not be permitted to convert those contributions into unprecedented private fortunes without public accountability. Where we differ is that Bernie wants to redistribute wealth after it has been extracted, while I am interested in how we distribute the means of wealth: ownership, agency, and participation, so that there is no confusion about who is owed what while the extraction occurs. Recent developments like Massachusetts House of Representatives unanimous passing of their Consumer Data Privacy Act, combined with the institutional economics of MIT’s own Daron Acemoglu & Simon Johnson, suggest that the future of prosperity will depend less on who controls AI and more on whether we build the institutions necessary for people to retain meaningful claims over the value they create. What follows is not a critique of Bernie Sanders as much as an attempt to answer the question that I believe a democratic socialism cannot: if AI derives its value from humanity, what institutions must exist so that humanity can participate in the ownership, governance, and benefits of that value from the very beginning?

Everything that follows is what I call inclusionism .

Part I: The Wrong Question When Senator Bernie Sanders argued that artificial intelligence was built on the collective knowledge of humanity and that the public should therefore own a substantial share of the companies developing it, I found myself in the unusual position of agreeing with almost everything he said while disagreeing with where he arrived.

That disagreement is not political.

At least not in the conventional sense.

It is institutional.

Like many Americans, I have watched the development of artificial intelligence with a mixture of awe and concern. The awe comes from the obvious reality that these systems are extraordinary. In a remarkably short period of time, artificial intelligence has moved from a niche scientific discipline to a foundational technology that is beginning to reshape education, medicine, software development, research, media, manufacturing, finance, and government. It is difficult to identify another technology in modern history that has spread through so many sectors so quickly.

The concern comes from a different place.

Every revolutionary technology changes the relationship between power and people. The industrial revolution changed the relationship between labor and capital. The railroad changed the relationship between geography and commerce. Electricity changed the relationship between production and time. The internet changed the relationship between information and distance.

Artificial intelligence is changing the relationship between human contribution and economic value.

That change is profound enough that most of our existing political language struggles to describe it.

For decades we have argued about labor and capital.

We have argued about workers and owners.

We have argued about private property and public goods.

We have argued about corporations and governments.

These debates remain important, but artificial intelligence introduces a question that sits beneath all of them.

Who owns the value created by human contribution itself?

The question sounds abstract until we recognize what artificial intelligence actually is.

The popular mythology surrounding AI tells a story about brilliant founders, visionary investors, and breakthrough algorithms. It is a story that has become familiar in American life. We celebrate entrepreneurs. We celebrate innovation. We celebrate disruption. We celebrate the courage of people willing to build the future.

There is truth in that story.

There is also omission.

Artificial intelligence did not emerge from the imagination of a handful of technology executives.

It emerged from humanity.

The books that trained language models were written by human beings.