The AI boom has begun to produce a political fantasy of public ownership. Donald Trump has praised the idea of AI companies contributing equity to a public wealth fund. Sam Altman has promoted versions of the same arrangement, and Bernie Sanders has called for a large one-time tax on AI firms paid in stock. Dario Amodei has spoken of universal capital accounts. The proposals differ, but they share one premise. If intelligence becomes a machine-owned source of extraordinary wealth, citizens may need a direct claim on the companies that own the machines.

The mechanism is less generous than the rhetoric. A few percentage points of equity in even the largest AI labs would not make households rich unless the companies grew into something close to planetary utilities. A broader levy on labs, chipmakers, cloud providers, and data-center firms would raise more money, but it would also force the state to define where the AI economy begins and ends. Public ownership creates another problem. A government that owns part of an AI firm may become more hesitant to regulate, break up, or punish it. The citizen is offered a small dividend, while the company receives a new argument for staying too important to disturb.