A national survey of 1,690 adults by research firm Verasight, carried out in June and published earlier this month, found that 69% of Americans support "forcing" AI firms to transfer 50% of their stock to a public sovereign wealth fund. That number lands in the middle of a wave of tech layoffs, while corporations keep pouring money into AI expansion and workers are left staring at the wreckage.
Benjamin Leff, chief executive officer of Verasight, said, "In the eyes of the public, AI Sovereign funds are seen as a tool to distribute the gains from the AI industry back to broader society." The phrasing is polite. The reality underneath is blunt: the gains are being hoarded now, and people know it.
Who Gets the Gains
In June, Senator Bernie Sanders proposed the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, which, if passed, would give the public a 50% stake in the largest AI companies in the U.S. Sanders said in a statement last month, "It would guarantee that the economic benefits generated by AI are used to improve the lives of all of us — not simply to make the richest people in the world even richer." He also said, "The future of AI and the fate of humanity must not be decided behind closed doors in Silicon Valley by billionaires seeking to maximize their power and profit."
That line says plenty on its own. The decisions are made behind closed doors, by billionaires, for power and profit. The public gets the bill, the layoffs, and the speeches about progress.
The survey and Sanders' proposal come as the rising number of tech layoffs in the U.S. has left many workers frustrated and worried over job security, even as corporations continue to ramp up capital expenditure for AI expansion. Goldman Sachs Senior Global Economist Joseph Briggs estimates that more than 9% of the labor force, or around 15 million workers, could lose their jobs during a 10-year AI transition period, the bank said in a report published last month. Briggs said, "This would be the type of automation and reallocation shock that we saw in the late '90s and early 2000s and in other periods of significant technological change." The Goldman Sachs report says Briggs believes those losses will prove temporary because AI will create many new jobs over the long term even as it destroys existing ones.
That promise of future jobs does a lot of work for the people cashing in now. It asks workers to absorb the shock first and trust the same system later.
What the Companies Say
A separate CNBC report said AI company executives are not seeing signs of overcapacity in the AI buildout, even as enterprises look more closely at how much AI is costing and the return on their investment. Chip stocks have had a blistering rally over the past year as investors bet on the semiconductor sector's central role in the global AI infrastructure buildout, but renewed volatility around chip stocks has sparked debate over whether that signals broader concern about AI demand.
Pat Gelsinger, the former Intel CEO and now general partner at Playground Global, told CNBC on Wednesday, "I somewhat think of AI demand as almost unlimited," adding that energy availability is "the only real limiter." He said, "Because how much economic value do you get for increased intelligence? Almost infinite across every industry imaginable."
Marc Boroditsky, chief revenue officer at Nebius, said, "What we're experiencing in terms of demand is extraordinary. There's much more demand than we're able to fulfil, and that's been our experience for some time now." Nebius is building data centers using Nvidia's GPUs. Andrew Feldman, CEO of Cerebras Systems, said the example of Meta and xAI selling excess capacity is a "unique" case. He said, "For the industry as a whole, the demand for compute far outstrips available capacity, and we're short on data centers. I think we're short on, as an industry, many of the inputs to compute."
Sungyun Park, CEO of Rebellions, said, "AI infrastructure momentum [is] still huge," and added, "I personally believe it's not the signal saying that … all the hyperscalers [are overinvesting] in the infrastructure." Rebellions is backed by Samsung and SK Hynix and is targeting an IPO in South Korea next year.
Michael Hurlston, CEO of Lumentum, said its products are sold out for the next five years. He said, "We're trying to build up our capacity as much as we possibly can to fulfil a demand that we see out five years at this point." Lumentum's stock is up around 600% over the last 12 months as investors pile into companies addressing key bottlenecks in the buildout of AI data centers.
Who Pays for the Buildout
The report also said enterprises are moving away from so-called "tokenmaxxing," a period when companies encouraged employees to use as much AI as possible no matter the result, often with tools from frontier labs like OpenAI and Anthropic. Companies are now focusing more on the return on investment from AI, especially as frontier models remain expensive relative to open source offerings from companies like DeepSeek or Alibaba.
Boroditsky said, "The CFO bringing the hammer down and slowing spend should actually be looking for value or valuemaxxing," adding that AI should be applied to create value that justifies the spending. He said, "We're seeing a shift now to more rationalization. We've seen it with every tech cycle, and that rationalization will definitely continue the demand."
Feldman said future AI use will likely split by workload, with frontier models used for more advanced problems and other models handling easier tasks. "I think it's probably the case that you don't need a giant bus to go to the grocery store," he said. "Certain workloads migrate to some type of compute and easier workloads to others, and I think as we learn and become more sophisticated in our deployment of AI, the same thing will happen."
So the machine keeps expanding, the executives keep talking about efficiency, and the workers keep getting told the pain is temporary. The public, meanwhile, is already asking for a different arrangement — one that takes the gains out of private hands and stops pretending the people at the top are steering this for anyone but themselves.