Your share of the AI wealth is a right - not a handout. Here is how we claw back our money.
AI is being built using our data without consent - and Big Tech's compensation proposal is just breadcrumbs
Why we actually own the capital behind the AI revolution.
Even OpenAI knows the future it is hawking is deeply flawed. When the company recently released its policy blueprint for the "Intelligence Age," it had to concede that the economic disruption heading our way is unlike anything we've seen before. OpenAI's response is to propose a public wealth fund, seeded partly by AI companies, with returns distributed directly to citizens.
It is an acknowledgment that something is going badly wrong with how AI's gains are being distributed. But let's be clear about what it represents: breadcrumbs.
We need to open our minds to the scale of what threatens. AI systems are increasingly capable of performing the creative, analytical and strategic work that was once the exclusive province of educated, well-paid professionals. This is far more than another wave of technological displacement, such as the shift from agriculture to industry, or from manufacturing to services. In each of those transitions, the demands on people may have changed, but people were still needed.
What's different now is that AI threatens to make human workers themselves obsolete in virtually every sector of the economy. While in previous automation waves, productivity gains were split between capital and labor, they're flowing to a tiny clique of companies and investors who hold the keys to a technology built on humanity's collective intelligence.
This last point in particular calls for a fundamental reframing of the conversation. The large language models powering today's AI revolution were trained on the accumulated documented output of human knowledge: books, articles, scientific papers, conversations and creative works. Every writer, teacher and researcher who ever put words on a page has contributed, without compensation or consent, to the substrate upon which AI's productive capacity was built.
This represents the greatest enclosure of the commons in history. And it changes the moral frame of the discussion about the wealth that's created. What is needed is a social dividend to all humanity, not as redistribution but as restitution. Most of the wealth accruing to the companies monetizing it has been expropriated by them.
OpenAI is telling regulators how it would like to be regulated.
In this context, OpenAI's own blueprint is not much more than a wish list dressed up as a policy proposal - a company telling regulators how it would like to be regulated. The fund it envisions would be seeded "partly" by AI companies, on terms the industry would presumably determine. It contains no mechanism to ensure the minimum level of returns to the public, no structural constraints on how AI profits are distributed, and no democratic governance over the AI systems reshaping our world.
In contrast, others across the political spectrum are waking up to this new reality. At one end, The Economist, not typically known for radical economic proposals, recently opined that "the partial nationalization of AI firms" deserves consideration, noting that "public ownership is the best way to make the social upside from the technology transparent." At the other end, Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont, announced plans to introduce the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act to give the public a 50% ownership stake in the nation's largest AI companies.
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Sanders notably referred to the Alaska Permanent Fund as a model. This fund was created in 1976, with state revenues arising from oil leases to benefit all Alaskans. Supported by a huge majority of Alaskans, it has grown to $80 billion and pays every Alaskan (including children) a dividend ranging from about $1,000 to $3,000 per year. However, the fund is subject to political meddling and is increasingly used to support the state's fiscal and economic needs rather than maintain a sustainable dividend policy.
Norway, by contrast, after the discovery of North Sea oil in the 1970s, set up a sovereign-wealth fund through a trust structure independent of central government and thus immunized against political manipulation. This massive fund, which currently holds $1.6 trillion, makes an annual distribution to citizens based on a five-year average of investment returns.
A citizens' assembly can govern an AI fund - shielded from both corporate lobbying and political pressures.
If such a trust structure were set up for AI dividends, how might it be democratically governed?
A compelling model comes from the burgeoning global movement of citizens' assemblies - deliberative bodies in which a randomly selected, representative cross-section of the public is convened to consider complex policy questions.
Citizens' assemblies have proven their capacity to provide judicious recommendations on contentious issues: Ireland's assembly on abortion rights led to a landmark constitutional referendum; France's Citizens' Convention on Climate produced a comprehensive package of ecological policy proposals. In both cases, ordinary citizens - given time, expert testimony and structured deliberation - reached conclusions that elected politicians had long avoided.
A similarly constituted body could govern the AI fund's investment priorities and distribution policy, shielded from both corporate lobbying and political pressures. Unlike a conventional regulatory agency, such an assembly would have a direct mandate from the public it serves.
This mandate could extend beyond merely managing the fund. The same collective intelligence that makes citizens' assemblies effective on climate or reproductive rights is needed even more for issues around AI development itself, such as which capabilities to prioritize and how to establish safety parameters. These raise fundamental questions about what kind of society we want to live in - and they should rightfully be decided by the people who will live in it.
The AI revolution will transform the world. The only real question is whether that transformation is imposed on us for the benefit of a tiny ownership class, or created in partnership with us, as a genuine expansion of shared human flourishing. History is watching. Let's not settle for breadcrumbs.
Jeremy Lent is the author of Ecocivilization: Making a World that Works for All (Melville House, 2026). He is a former technology entrepreneur, co-founder of the Ecocivilization Coalition, and founder of the Deep Transformation Network.
-Jeremy Lent
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July 11, 2026 12:01 ET (16:01 GMT)
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