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?