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:
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.
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/8Ej9z
If 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)"
I forget how pro state people are on here sometimes. Is no one concerned what the fascist government will do with that stake?
americans arent being honest with themselves about how bad the state of their nation is in.
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.
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.
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...
rare bernie L
just do socialism. stop this wishy washy bullshit. capitalism must die.
Tax the tokens
Every country
Every token
100% AI Tax
Not the right move dawg
If this ever passed, I bet we’d see a pretty quick devaluation in these things.
check my math:
0.5 x 0 = 0
I see plenty of objections, many from people who probably know much more about AI and US law than myself, but if what I interpret is accurate I’m trying to find flaw with it, given what’s confronting us with AI and its management.
I don’t see anywhere where the US government would be buying or bailing anything out, at least not upfront anyway. There’s no doubt to me these companies have stolen much, so they owe the public back for that. There’s no doubt to me those that run these systems aren't working in the US public’s interest, so the question of whether regulating or offering public protections should happen isn’t hard for me. That of course implies good governance, not what currently exists, which is a problem.
As I said I might be missing a lot, not being American or an AI user, but yeah aside from who is in charge currently I only see benefit here.
As I said I might be missing a lot, not being American or an AI user, but yeah aside from who is in charge currently I only see benefit here.
It hurts the profit margins by benefitting the public, so it will fail. A snowball has a better chance in Hell than this bill has to pass.
That one I didn’t miss, I left it out. I can’t argue with it.
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.
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).
Wouldn’t this make everyone interested in the bad business practices that would increase the profits?
Just ban running them on a loss. Maybe even ban running anything at a loss in order to curb competition, etc.
Kurt Vonnegut's "Player piano" nailed it in 1952:
Automation makes factories more efficient, tax that efficiency and give it back to the displaced workers.
Of course, since then, we've been doing nothing but lowering corporate taxes...
I think that’s a traditional part of anti-monopoly laws, shame nobody enforces those anymore
Anti-monopoly laws have been problematic to enforce since their inception, because their targets are often as powerful as the government that might dare to regulate them.
I wonder if this is some sneaky way to make sure they aren’t bailed out by the public when the crash happens. The companies will revolt against this. And then when they coming running for a bailout we can just say “well you didn’t want to be publicly owned”
Funny - bis Argument is : ai is built in human collective knowledge thus wie should participate in the profits and ... Give it all to americans
Dont get me wrong i like the sentiment - but seems like it comes down to - ai was built by THe collective knowledge of all humans - the profits should go to all americans
What happens when they go bust?
Maybe we all get to enjoy a massive tax write off like a big business
50% too low.
cool so the dems have the mind virus too, yah yall are fucked
maybe i'm just old man yells at cloud here, but why can't we just call a bad idea a bad idea?
That's great for the US, but these companies are fucking the whole planet. What will the US do when other countries hold them responsible?
To give the government a 50% stake. I know the government is the public in some sense, but still.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
