2 hoursAlmost everyone in this thread seems to be assuming the US would pay for half the shares/equity of these companies.
That is not what is being proposed.
What is being proposed is that the US Govt simply seize half the shares/equity/board voting powers in these companies, without paying a cent for them.
It is a half-nationalization.
Not a half-bailout.
- vane@lemmy.worldEnglish51 minutes
Nationalization doesn’t change the fact that for example OpenAI plans to burn $100B in 2026 without any profit so taxpayers will inherit $50B debt just from 2026. Moreover it doesn’t stop those companies for raising more debt from for example corporate bonds emission just by saying 50% of their capital is government owned. That would allow them to literally raise trillions.
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2025/12/30/openais-cash-burn-will-be-one-of-the-big-bubble-questions-of-2026
https://archive.ph/8Ej9zIf OpenAI fails, and the government owns half of it…
The assets and power the government acquired for no monetary cost simply becomes zero.
The other part of simply seizing half the shares is that the government (presumably a number of ministers/officials in charge of the new sovereign wealth fund) now has half the voting power of the entire board.
That is a pretty direct way to wield influence as to the decisions the company can make, how the CEO can behave.
You want maybe the accounting to actually deprecate the GPUs they have or lease over a realistic timeframe, instead of a totally bullshit one?
Half of your shareholders now demand this.
C Suite refuse to comply?
Begin the process of firing them.
- vane@lemmy.worldEnglish4 minutes
OpenAI don’t own any GPU, they lease it from Microsoft or from Oracle. Oracle bought GPU by emitting billions of dollars of corporate bonds. OpenAI only owns AI models that they copy to datacenters. Same is with Anthropics. They own no datacenter or GPU they just lease it from other parties.
Bernie Sanders is putting taxpayers responsible for overspending on datacenters and make datacenters bailout. He should propose that all models should be open to public if they are used by government organizations so it can be independently audited by researchers. That would prevent those companies to cause harm to people.
- banshee@lemmy.worldEnglish2 hours
Good clarification. I’m convinced we will end up bailing them out anyway. We should nationalize and operate as a public good if generative AI is that important to society.
I genuienly struggle to think of a kind of economic thing that better qualifies as a public utility.
Completely agree that this kind of technology, with such broad and immense ongoing, as well as potential implications, cannot be allowed to be directed by the whims of wealthy capitalist conmen rent seekers.
- Bakkoda@lemmy.worldEnglish2 hours
Maybe we all get to enjoy a massive tax write off like a big business
- x0x7@lemmy.worldEnglish5 minutes
But the government will actually own it, not you and me. So the government will write of its taxes to itself?
Does this mean we’ll all be bag holders when the AI bubble bursts?
- Rooster326@programming.devEnglish4 hours
We are already holding the bag.
They are “too big to fail”
It is the de way
- wewbull@feddit.ukEnglish2 hours
They’re very much not. They have high valuations, but very few employees. Very different to the banks (where the public would lose money) and the car firms (who employed large numbers of workers)
- wewbull@feddit.ukEnglish2 hours
Pensions and other investments, yes.
Not current accounts which was what was at risk in 2008. When the bank goes bust you don’t just lose money. You become unable to do anything financial, like get paid.
- Rooster326@programming.devEnglish2 hours
We didn’t just bail the banks in 2008.
Now do the US Auto Makers.
Who are still making terrible decisions
- MyVeryRealName@lemmy.worldEnglish3 hours
How? The government doesn’t plan to compensate the companies.
The point being, if the public owns half of the company but the company is failing, now the public has acquired 50% liability of a dying business.
Like others said though, I’m sure taxpayers will be on the hook either way.
- Furbag@pawb.socialEnglish3 hours
They already are! The government signed exclusive military contracts with OpenAI to develop autonomous weapons. Half of these AI companies are being propped up with taxpayer dollars in the form of government contracts or subsidies, or the promise that there will be a taxpayer revenue stream coming their way in the near future.
- foxwolf@pawb.socialEnglish3 hours
Are you new here? The government will absolutely compensate the companies when the bubble bursts.
- atcorebcor@sh.itjust.worksEnglish4 hours
Wouldn’t this make everyone interested in the bad business practices that would increase the profits?
- MasterNerd@lemmy.zipEnglish55 minutes
More likely in would just exarcerbate the financial instability of the AI industry and hasten its downfall, which I’m all for
- x0x7@lemmy.worldEnglish3 minutes
Or delay it. How would the government having 50% stake in an industry make it less stable? Now the government will form policy around protecting its stake. This will delay a collapse that we should want to happen sooner than later, and ideally be as divested from as possible.
- x0x7@lemmy.worldEnglish53 seconds
Government. We are not the government. This is a very short read.
https://cdn.mises.org/anatomy-of-the-state.pdf
And it’s covered pretty convincingly in the first chapter.
- HrabiaVulpes@europe.pubEnglish6 hours
You know they will agree and give everyone stakes exactly when bubble is about to pop
You didn’t read the article, or you didn’t understand it.
The US Govt would not pay a cent for the shares of these companies.
It would simply seize them, half-nationalize them.
Its a half nationalization, not a half bailout.
- Evil_Shrubbery@thelemmy.clubEnglish5 hours
Public stake isn’t for profits (especially not short term capital gains), it’s about concentration & not getting controlled.
- HrabiaVulpes@europe.pubEnglish5 hours
Controlling something worthless is pointless anyway.
And giving it away to everyone will score political points.
- 6 hours
It would be a good idea if the entirety of the current industry for it wasn’t built entirely on smoke and mirrors type promises.
The general idea (so far as I can parse) is that if these companies are expecting a government bailout when it all goes south, then the tax payers who would be bailing them out should get paid back. But in practice, what will happen is we’ll be saddled with the debt and these companies will weasel out of it.
The fact is I don’t want to own a stake in any of these companies. I would rather they make it illegal for these companies to ask for a bailout from the government and close loopholes they will use to file for bankruptcy.
If they’re going to fail the government should buy their assets (data centers, infrastructure, etc) if the people agree that’s okay. Instead of what will likely happen (the companies left standing when it all goes under will buy up all the assets dirt cheap).
- captainlezbian@lemmy.worldEnglish5 hours
Idk I support bankruptcy for them, but I think it’s valuable to give mutual funds and pensions priority in restitution. Venture capital got themselves into this mess through irresponsible investment.
- humanspiral@lemmy.caEnglish6 hours
Defense, oil, and media industries should be a higher percentage. They are historically responsible for most corrupt lobbying/disinformation/warmongering and alliance with zionazi rule over the US. The strategic unanimity of “must beat China or maintain zionazi bias over population control” for AI means that it is meant to be a corruption vector for skynet, funneling all of our wealth and liberty onto privatized profit from skynet.
- Evil_Shrubbery@thelemmy.clubEnglish5 hours
Also all pubic infrastructure that is needed for normal lives (from transport to payment systems).
AI is just a financial grift to circlejerk money out of the stock market; and then reap a big, fat government bailout when the bubble inevitably pops.
If we share the profits, do we also share the risks? What happens to this plan when AI implodes?
First of all, fuck no. Remove all of the AI companies. Now. Secondly, this will guarantee they become “too big to fail”. Like, it feels as if they’re purposefully doing this to make it palatable to bail them out.
Wait.
Remove?
… How? From what?
What does that even mean?
… the point of this is to essentially half nationalize the companies.
No public money would be used to purchase these assets / equity shares. The government would simply seize them.
Is this a perfect solution? Fuck no.
Is it significantly better than the public having 0 effective say in what huge megacorps do? The public bearing the socialized costs of profilgate profit maximization of AI companies, the gains all being funnelled upward toward the already wealthy to super to hyper to uber wealthy?
Uh probably almost certainly yes.
Specifically, Sanders proposes a one-time transfer of 50 percent of equity from companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI to the government. The idea: since AI is built on the accumulated knowledge, creativity, conversations, and labor of the American people — typically without permission or payment — the American people deserve a cut of the profits.
This is not ‘public/government money buys out half the equity of AI companies’.
This is ‘we are the government and we own half of you now, because we say so, fuck you’.
The fund would acquire half the stock of the largest AI companies in the country through a mandated equity transfer — Sanders is explicit that this is not a profits tax. The government would then hold voting shares and receive equal board representation at each company, giving it formal power to block decisions deemed harmful to the public.
It is literally ‘we own half your equity now, and have half the voting rights on your board(s)’.
So basically that would be something like doing a stock split.
In a standard stock split, private stock holders who used to own one share, now they own two shares of half the original share’s value. 2 * 1/2 = 1.
But with this, this is more like the private stock owners… the split happens, they still own the one share, but its value has been halved, and now the US government owns the other share.
2 * 1/2 = 1/2 {government/public} + 1/2 {private stock holders}
Then, those stocks owned by the US government get put into essentially a new government organization that would manage those stocks snd finances, as a soveriegn wealth fund.
The top of the K, the wealthiest 10% to 1% that own 90% or whatever of all stocks/equities… they all get a 50% haircut on their AI holdings.
And the proceeds get put toward the people.
Its not technically a wealth tax per se, but it accomplishes a similar thing, in a targeted and managed way.
Anyone who thinks this is ‘the US government is gonna buy half the AI stocks’ is mistaken.
That isn’t what is being proposed, ya’ll either didn’t read the article, or don’t know finance terminology.
The latter I can at least understand, but I absolutely must explain and correct the mistake.
- isekaihero@ani.socialEnglish7 hours
I agree. No public funds should go to AI. No taxpayer money should be used to construct AI or datacenters. When the AI companies start to collapse, they should receive no bailouts.
Bailouts are corruption. Why do the rich get socialism and the rest of us get crushing capitalism? When we fail, we get stepped on. When the rich fail, they get billion dollar bailouts? But they claim they deserve to keep all their riches because they worked hard for it?
I could be a billionaire oligarch too if all of my failures were compensated for with billion dollar bailouts. It’s not hard to succeed when you are elevated to the heights of the gods every time you face a little adversity.
- positiveWHAT@lemmy.worldEnglish9 hours
I think the intention is to get the profits of automation to the people when more jobs are inevitably automated.
- jj4211@lemmy.worldEnglish9 hours
It is, but unintended consequences.
With this, then we couldn’t afford Sam Altman to experience failure because he will drag folks down with him. So the companies invested become too big to fall, and the still private leadership gets to run things however they wish knowing the government will cover for any mistakes.
It’s bad enough as the government will panic about retirement accounts when they falter, this exacerbates it.
It’s a risky form of private-public partnership, with a lot of ways the company can privatize rewards but socialize the risk.
- humanspiral@lemmy.caEnglish3 hours
it actually creates symetry for risk/reward, but it does incentivize giving skynet contracts with argument that people get 50% of the proceeds from skynet abuse.
- pHr34kY@lemmy.worldEnglish9 hours
This feels like a setup to the biggest rug-pull in history. The whole thing is going to shit and the taxpayers will be holding the bags.
You didn’t read the article, or you didn’t understand it.
The US Govt would not pay a cent for the shares of these companies.
It would simply seize them, half-nationalize them.
Its a half nationalization, not a half bailout.
- moustachio@lemmy.worldEnglish5 hours
These AI companies rushing to do IPOs so the public’s retirement account index funds can buy them up and take the loss for them, too.
These people need to suffer real consequences.
- TronBronson@lemmy.worldEnglish7 hours
Bruh they are working on deregulating debt swaps so they can hide how much leverage is going into these build outs. Trillions of dollars of data centers with mortgages and rent to own NVDA chips. its looking like the greatest scam of all time rn.
- trolololol@lemmy.worldEnglish8 hours
I think it makes sense. The bill will be paid off from taxes, so it makes sense that the bailout comes with company stock transfer to workers.
It’s fair for many reasons. One of them is that billionaires and corporations don’t pay taxes.
What about, instead of 50%, make the bailed out company be 100% owned by the people - not the government, the people.
- pHr34kY@lemmy.worldEnglish8 hours
By the time the public own it, it will be a liability, not an asset. I’ve seen my government purchase a telco’s entire infrastructure only to immediately write it off.
Just set it on fire already.
- TronBronson@lemmy.worldEnglish7 hours
yep lol and thats how it will work. we’ll get a bunch of data centers with a 5 year lifespan and 30 years of debt strapped to them.
- TronBronson@lemmy.worldEnglish7 hours
well said. The problem is they are overvalued anyway… so we take half of a trillion dollar company that only worth 30% of that number, so we take a big ass loss. unless we are just straight up taking half and there’s no compensation provided. can’t imagine the SRCOTUS riding with that policy.
- 5 hours
Always seeing these kinds of messages and kinda curious, I guess you mean LLMs with all AI and not truly all ai? Cause there are a lot more stuff under that umbrella term thats super useful for example in medicine etc
Yes, LLMs, the article refers to it in that manner so I did too.
- megopie@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish9 hours
I don’t think these companies are worth the value of the paper that their charters are written on. I don’t think many of them are going to last much longer, but he might actually be on to something here in terms of diffusing a massive financial fraud that’s about to happen in broad daylight.
The common wisdom right now is to just “put your money in an index fund, it’s safer and outperforms actively managed portfolios.” Which is to say, a fund that just buys a little bit of everything from a given list, rather than trying to pick stocks that someone thinks will do well, it creates a very diversified portfolio that is protected from anyone company fucking up by having the value spread over as many things as possible. Because many people just put their money in index funds now, getting listed in an index kind of guarantees that lots of people will be buying the shares consistently and thus consistently causing the price to rise over time.
To get in to these lists, normally, a company has to have been public for a while, generally about a year, and show profitability for a prolonged time. These rules have recently been changed though.
A bunch of the AI companies are doing initial public offerings (IPO meaning putting their shares on the public markets for the first time) in the next few months. And stating absolutely insane valuations. Because of the rule changes, they’re basically all getting immediately listed in index funds. And since they’re all targeting insane valuations, they’re going to automatically suck up a bunch of retirement money by default.
I’m not sure about anthropic and openAI on this next part, but SpaceX (which just “bought” Xai), is only going public with about 5% of it’s shares, so theoretically they can just trickle more shares on to the market to get bought up by index funds, and because supply of actual shares is artificially constrained, it will lead to massive overvaluation of those shares, taking up a disproportionate amount of money going in to index funds.
It’s actually fucking criminal that this is being allowed to happen, but because the rules for index funds and IPOs are set by financial institutions and stock exchanges, with very limited oversight by the government, they can just do this.
If the government were to take these 50% shares, it would kind of throw a wrench in the plans, since it would give the government the ability to sell those shares on to the market and stop the over valuation that allows them to take disproportionately from the index funds.
- borQue@lemmy.zipEnglish6 hours
Oh fuck do we have censoring moderhaters here too now? I can stand up for my own opinion, asshole moderhaterfucktard
- SabinStargem@lemmy.todayEnglish7 hours
The public should own all of AI, and corporations should be forced to ask the public to lend compute. AI is a powerful tool, and if we give the elite ownership of it, they will someday cut society loose: By killing or enslaving us all, and using robots to autonomously fulfill the wealthy’s wish to be truly free of responsibility.
When I found out what it meant when other countries have sovereign wealth funds…
I have no idea how most people in America keep convincing themselves they’ve somehow got a good deal.
- boonhet@sopuli.xyzEnglish12 hours
It’s mostly oil countries that have a sovereign wealth fund and it comes out of the oil money. Norway, Saudi Arabia. Idea being that oil is a limited resource with a lot of value and the proceeds should be used to ensure everyone’s future.
Of course the US IS an oil country…
