Almost 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.
EDIT
I go into more detail and explain in this comment in this same thread:
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.
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.
xAI is now (or will very soon be) part of SpaceX.
They physically own massive ‘Colossus’ datacenters with tons of GPUs.
As to leasing vs owning, I already addressed that.
If you are the government and you are half of the shareholders, you can pressure your own AI company, or the companies from whom your AI company leases GPUs from to be more honest and transparent regarding accounting methodologies.
Bernie is not proposing that any taxpayer money be put toward this at all.
The only actual expense here would be the minute cost of simply hiring some people to run and manage the sovereign wealth fund. Miniscule in comparison to the potential equity value of $$$s being managed. Think something like the administrative cost of running say, the SEC or FTC, in comparison to the amount of money moving around that they can affect.
He is proposing the government simply half nationalize these companies, as Trump not long ago did with TikTok.
If the government is half of every US based AI company’s board, they can also very effectively pressure them to make the models open source.
Not sure if you don’t understand the concept of nationalization, but basically, thats when the government looks at something and says ‘i own this now, because I say so’.
Theres no payment. Its… why I use the word ‘seize’.
Same way Marx argued that workers should ‘seize’ the means of production: Just take them.
SpaceX is another flop. It’s main income is from NASA. $30B in long term debt, they estimate $1.75T valuation only year they showed any profit was in 2024 and it was $242M. Just to compare the private company that literally landed on moon Firefly Aerospace is worth $7B valuation debuted last year. -38% on NASDAQ. I’m not from US you’re living in some bad dream right now. Wake up people because they are fucking you in the ass and you’re clapping.
I could build giant fireworks for 242 million!
I agree that SpaceX is a fiscal shitshow.
Would you rather own half of it for no cost?
Or own none of it for no cost?
If you own half of it for no cost, you have a substantial ability to … tell it what to do, with its people, its assets, its stuff, its technology.
If you own none of it for no cost, you do not have this ability.
In both scenarios, if the stock value goes to zero, you lose nothing, because you paid nothing.
Again, you seem to be struggling with the concept of nationalization.
The government just takes stuff over, because it says so, and it is the government.
No one is compensated, no one is paid.
In the US, cops can do this thing called asset seizure.
You get pulled over for a dead taillight.
You own a carwash and you’re on your way to deposit the month’s excess cash into the business account at your bank.
Cop decides you smell like marijuana, finds your cash and your well kept accounting records.
Doesn’t matter, that might be drug money, cops take the money.
Imagine that, but with stocks instead.
But is it critical infrastructure ?
Country should own roads, hospitals, power plants, water, lend land for farmers instead of Bill Gates owning 1 / 4000 of your farm land, communal housing, things that serve people so country should make sure everyone have access to it. Not what serve corporations and rich and push money there. Probably half of your 401k money are already there if you follow the dots.
It would be better to nationalize or buy office buildings from corporations and use this money. Tax their assets from tax havens. Tax them until instead of crying they start begging. Now your country are treating those companies like little babies.
You have different mindset, that’s what I’m trying to explain.
You should have free healthcare and free education like in Europe. Cheap transportation across country in trains, bike lanes. Cheap food and houses. Be happy. Why you can’t travel by train from New York to Los Angeles ? Russia that everyone laughs from and hates because their politicians are idiots, they can travel from Moscow to Vladivostok.
Instead of that you’re launching farts towards moon and chasing demons in computers.
People over power.
True but most of the value of these LLMs comes from ingesting data produced by the public, with a healthy amount of copyrighted data.
Would you be in favour of class action lawsuits to compensate for the intellectual theft instead?
No, not instead.
In addition to, sure.
Class action lawsuits as a primary counter action to damages?
… why not just … stop the damages from happening?
If you have 50% of the shares, you have a controlling interest on the board.
You can significantly just tell the company what to do, what policies to have.
Going through through the courts to compensate the damage after the fact is massively more expensive and time consuming… its hitting someone with your car and they paying their medical bill 2 years later.
Why not just not hit them with the car?
Yeah that’s my point, actually.
Yeah that’s what I read here, acquisition not share purchase.
As someone who has never used AI, another thing that springs to mind; the possibility that under good governance and regulation, AI services might become more trusted and perform better.
I’m trying to find flaw with this proposal, given what’s in front of us with AI, as someone who doesn’t know a lot about using it but sees everyday the problems bad regulation and intention causes with it.
Well…
Very broadly speaking, yes, having a much more direct regulation of how you can use ‘AI’, and how you can ‘generate’ it, for lack of a better term…
Yeah. AI isn’t totally useless. It can do a lot of very neat and useful things.
But, if used improperly, it can literally destroy the world’s software systems.
Just in the last 24-48 hours, Meta put an AI in charge of its customer support for Instagram.
People figured out that you can just use a VPN to set your IP to the approximate location of any Instagram account, tell it ‘oh i lost my email, heres my new one, can you send me a password reset email?’… and it would just do it.
The AI got wired in to the backend of Instagram’s security systems… and then used them to bypass them, because it wss asked to, nicely.
You’d have to have actual experts, not in AI, but in software engineering, systems architecture, experienced full stack senior devs, make up like a council of mandatory safety practices, things that LLMs should never be allowed to be plugged in to.
The… original idea of like a decade ago, was that the people developing this … would do that, they’d self regulate.
Then they decided they’d rather be trillionaires.
And also, a whole lot of people are the boat you’re in, not understanding much about AI… but they’re also delusional narcissists who are highly susceptibls to being upsold by people they view as more successful than them.
So those people just hear ‘Use AI or be left behind!’ and then layoff half the company to afford some kind of not even half baked AI implementation… and the latest numbers are something like 90-95% of firms that adopted AI in the last 12 or 18 months saw 0 or negative overall productivity gain.
… because this shit is not actually magic.
So yeah, yeah, formal regulation, at a very direct snd engaged level… I mean like AI can easily do more monetary damage than a nuclear warhead going off in a major city, if used improperly, by dumb hairless monkeys that want an easy button instead of any actual work associated with running anything.
Better idea: drive a stake 50% through AI CEO’s chest. Better, faster results, not just economically, but ecologically too!
I agree! Just blow the brains out of the tech broligarch chud billionaires!
They’ll just elect another.
Stakes are reusable.
That just raises CEO salaries because it proves my ongoing theory that CEOs get paid as much as they do to take the fall for everything the company does so the shareholders don’t lose money.
Please don’t throw sand in the eyes of things you don’t agree with
Said the robber to his victim.
I forget how pro state people are on here sometimes. Is no one concerned what the fascist government will do with that stake?
The fascists currently own that stake anyway, what’s the difference?
I mean they own way too large of a stake but a big portion is mutual funds currently. If we just transfers the fascists stake to the government it’d be a wash to me
americans arent being honest with themselves about how bad the state of their nation is in.
But our amazing big brother is gonna take care of us all! They only want what’s best for billionaires! I mean Russia! Crap no best for America! That’s the word!
50% might have been a fair cut if they actually asked for permission up front,but they didn’t. Everything made by AI is fruit if the poison tree and should be something equal to public domain.
ai doesn’t make money so this is a bailout for a piece of junk. the amount of people here that think this will work out is fuckin incredible.
Nothing in the legislation reads as a bailout, the government would unilaterally take 50% stake and the associated voting power. The American public is no worse off if it doesn’t turn a profit or gets liquidated.
The bailout would happen when the conservative vultures circle. “We can’t let them fail, that would devalue the American portfolio (never mind that this bailout is 2x any value that could ever be gained back)”
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That’s no reason not to ask
Giving up only means that it will never happen. Having the balls to demand, it means it will at least remain a thorn in the Nazis side.
And if you ever propose the argument, other than “fuck the Nazis“, then I can’t see why anyone should ever back you
Agreed, you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.
To take it a bit further: this is why the elite echelon of society is full of narcissistic assholes. Normal people feel shame when asking for more than their fair share. All the rich know is “gimmee” and “mine” so they naturally plunder their way to the top through their shamelessness and lack of self reflection and empathy.
Normal folks could get a bit more shameless about demanding our fair cut and a huge chunk of the rich and powerful could stfu and shamefully reflect on everyone they exploited to get to where they are. Actually we could all reflect a little more because even the low middle class American/European lifestyle floats on a pool of blood and exploitation, even though we like to pretend our shit doesn’t stink.
We talk about “top-down” economics. How about “bottom-up” instead. Once everyone has free healthcare. Once everyone has food. Once everyone has basic human rights. Then, and only then, does the money trickle up so you can buy a yacht. The incentive to make society succeed is still there, but suddenly there’s an incentive to uplift the most vulnerable instead of ignoring, mistreating, or even exterminating them.
How about tax hikes that slow down when quality of life indicators go up. The faster and more comprehensively corporations unfuck their shit, the slower we hike it. Comply or pay.
I know this already a wall of text, but I also want to tie it in with bargaining. Have ya’ll ever been to a big street market in a country with shopkeepers who are extremely skilled and shrewd when it comes to bartering? The rich and powerful are the shopkeepers and we’re the naive American tourists flooding the market. They’re gonna tell you that their kids are gonna starve if they knock $10 off that fake Rolex or that their boss will be angry. They definitely try to make you think that it cost them more than the screaming deal they’re giving you. That’s not always true, but the narrative is often effective to separate the tourist and their money. We have to be shrewd, we have to be cutthroat, and we have to be willing to walk when companies don’t play on our terms.
All of text? You can’t defeat my argument with points I never raised. At this point, you’re just defeating yourself.
I understand your frustration, but if all you can think of is ways to lose, you’ll never think of ways to win
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I feel that logic is flawed.
If you ever feel that “fuck the Nazis” is flawed logic, then you’re a Nazi
And you have no logic to argue
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Except the nazis who matter don’t give a shit. You think musk is going to give this a second thought? All this amounts to is a distraction. The problem with bills like this is they take away resources from something that can do some actual good.
Except the nazis who matter
And you automatically lose this round of “are you a piece of shit?”
This would be a nicer place if everyone extended a little grace to each other. It seems unlikely that the commenter meant “the Nazis who personally, emotionally matter to me” and pretty likely that they meant “the Nazis who are unfortunately very powerful.”
Maybe you’re right. But if they automatically give in to the powerful fascists, then what use would they be in a fight against them?
In a war against fascists, against Nazis, one must consider their collaborators as fascists, as Nazis
If I’m living in 1941 Paris, and I turned in my gay neighbor and my Jewish friend, how am I any better than any SS officer marching down the street?
Of course, without any consideration, I’m obviously not. I might as well be shoveling bodies into ovens at Auschwitz.
There are no shades of gray here. The evil herein is black and white, and quite absolute.
And never forget: unforgivable
But if your fight against the nazis will only waste your energy and have no discernible effect on their cause, what good is it? In fact, your fight could serve the opposite purpose if it feeds their persecution complex. They can point to your failed fight in propaganda to fuel their movement. I’m saying fight smarter, not necessarily harder. I’m not saying don’t fight at all.
But if your fight against the nazis will only waste your energy and have no discernible effect on their cause, what good is it?
That’s not the starting point in the argument we’re dealing with because that is not the reality of the situation. And if your counter argument is against propaganda, then dishing out a bunch of propaganda about how the winning side is losing, then I dare say the first thing you need to deal with is how you’re drowning in hypocrisy.
Who would vote for it other than Sanders?
Dems are as deep in the tank for the AI companies as any Republican.
It’s a bad idea anyhow. We can’t afford the water and hazard of all the electricity use. Plus, it’s going to all loose money for another 10 years.
Does this mean we’ll all be bag holders when the AI bubble bursts?
How? The government doesn’t plan to compensate the companies.
Are you new here? The government will absolutely compensate the companies when the bubble bursts.
Yes but not when it seizes half 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.
Do these companies have liabilities?
Tax the tokens
Every country
Every token
100% AI Tax
Keep your eye on the ball: 100% of the profits must pay for universal healthcare.
What profits? All AI companies have major losses. Except Nvidia of course, which just sells the hardware to the other companies so that they can make a loss.
At best, this will just socialize the losses made by decisions of capitalists.
Yes, that was the joke
Perhaps the sarcasm was lost in the comment somehow?
I just corrected a misspelling in my original comment. Perhaps that clears things up?
50% seems very low. They created these companies by scraping and pirating information.
50% means that they just need to fool a few people to get what they want. Imo it should be more like 90% public with a requirement that all services must be provided for free.
You know they will agree and give everyone stakes exactly when bubble is about to pop
Public stake isn’t for profits (especially not short term capital gains), it’s about concentration & not getting controlled.
Controlling something worthless is pointless anyway.
And giving it away to everyone will score political points.
Wdym away to everyone?
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.
Just ban running them on a loss. Maybe even ban running anything at a loss in order to curb competition, etc.
I think that’s a traditional part of anti-monopoly laws, shame nobody enforces those anymore
What happens when they go bust?
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).
How about a 50% stake in all companies valued over 5 billionaire dollars.
how about a 100% stake in all companies
Join lemmy.ml doesn’t fill me with confidence that that would work out well.
tankies are fucking idiots and probably feds to wreck the concept of socialism, the US government has a long and storied history of such behavior
Very true.
Ummmmm one of the main targets of COINTELPRO was the CP USA and their support of the USSR, even in Hungary and Prague.
Which is where the term “tankie” literally comes from.
You seem to be arguing against your own post.
the US infiltrates leftist groups to sow division, to prevent them from making progress and acting as wreckers.
tankies redirect leftist energy away from organizing in a way that would be effective, and instead towards supporting imperialism of a different color
i believe that this is probably supported by state actors, likely including the CIA
just my little conspiracy theory. it doesn’t really matter if its true or not, the fact remains that tankies are fucking dipshits and that socialism shouldn’t be judged by a minority of loud dipshits
Yeah, this is the same stupidity as when ‘tankies’ claim socdems are CIA.
Even the use of the term just shows the person using it isn’t bothering with actually thinking, they just want to mark a border of themselves as the only true leftist, and everyone else as to the right.
It’s nonsense and smells of terminal online nonsense that produces no form of actual change.
ok
Wait, so the workers would control the things that let us produce value?
Sounds familiar somehow . . . .
yes, socialism good, capitalism bad
Boom.
I don’t know how you divide it up amongst countries but I like where your head is.
