Bernie Sanders Says AI Should Belong to the Government

Along with everything else

Sen. Bernie Sanders, an 84-year-old socialist, has never seen anything he doesn’t want to seize, whether he understands it or not. Despite having very little understanding of computers or the internet, let alone AI, Sanders decided that AI is the latest front in his socialist campaign.

Sanders recently joined Communist China’s campaign against American AI with a Chinese Communist conclave on Capitol Hill urging that the PRC be included in global AI regulation. Now, Sanders has come out with an op-ed in the New York Times urging that the government seize 50% of AI companies. The op-ed is naturally decorated with Communist art of activists with red flags covered in ones and zeroes demanding the nationalization of another technology.

According to Sen. Sanders, the government has the right to seize half of AI companies because “Artificial intelligence was not created out of thin air. The data and language used by generative A.I. tools didn’t just pop into Sam Altman’s head or Elon Musk’s imagination. A.I. is built on our collective intelligence: our books, songs, artwork, journalism, computer code, scientific research, videos, conversations, images and ideas spanning generations.”

That is obviously true of AI and of any kind of computer technology and of all human knowledge in general. There are no tabula rasa inventions. Whether it’s Newton’s laws of motion or Einstein’s theory of relativity, or the works of Rembrandt, the plays of Shakespeare and the symphonies of Beethoven, all human inventions are built on the sum of human thought.

These inventions and innovations then in turn also add to collective knowledge of civilization.

How Sen. Bernie Sanders decided that the collective knowledge of the human race is the rightful property of the United States government and that it has the power to seize 50% of anything based on that collective knowledge is a little unclear, but the implications of it would also allow the government to seize 50% of anything that wasn’t “created out of thin air”.

That’s 50% of every invention, book, sickle, hammer, kettle, car, building, and song too.

AI has been trained on human knowledge, and in cases where that human knowledge has been copyrighted, patented or otherwise restricted for use, the legal owners of it may have a case, but in no way shape or form do Sen. Bernie Sanders and his political allies have any legal claim on the sum of human knowledge, let alone the right to take possession of anything in its name.

Sen. Bernie Sanders claims to oppose AI, but his op-ed shows that it really excites him because he likes the idea of the collectivization of human knowledge. If he really opposed AI, he wouldn’t be trying to socialize it and seize half of it. Instead, he supports stripping individuals of their creativity as long as he can then assign half of it to a regime run by his political allies.

“Tech oligarchs have fed this knowledge into their A.I. models without permission, without acknowledgment, without compensation. In other words, the creative work of millions of people — writers, artists, musicians, journalists, teachers, scientists and ordinary citizens — has essentially been stolen by some of the wealthiest people in the world. It’s time for us to reclaim it,” Bernie argues.

But who is “us”? Is Bernie’s “us” the people who created it, or is the state which has done far less than any of the AI pioneers to create it or to create anything else. Sen. Sanders argues that AI shouldn’t benefit Elon Musk, Sam Altman or “venture capitalists on Wall Street”, it should instead become the property of the state under the authority of politicians like him.

But if Musk and Altman shouldn’t be repeating the benefits of AI, why should Bernie Sanders?

Socialists claim that they want to remedy the abuses of capitalism, but their proposed remedies invariably involve the consolidation of human activity under an even more abusive state. Rather than restoring control over creative products to the individuals who created them, Sen. Sanders just wants to seize AI in their name and make off with it in the name of the creative proletariat, the “writers, artists, musicians, journalists, teachers, scientists and ordinary citizens”, and then hand it over to politicians and bureaucrats, much like the Soviet Union he admired promised to turn over land to the citizens, then banished the peasantry to neo-feudal collective farms, and instead made sure that no one except elites in their dachas had any land to call their own.

Bernie’s call for grabbing 50% of AI because it comes from the sum of human knowledge embodies the classic socialist fallacy that everything is collective and that the collective is the same as the government. If something emerged from humanity, then it isn’t the work of individuals, but of the group, and the group is represented by radical leftist governments.

The socialist politician’s op-ed promises that if the government can seize 50% of AI, “the trillions of dollars potentially generated by A.I. are used to improve the lives of all of us — not simply to make the richest people in the world even richer”. But who’s kidding whom?

Seizing 50% of AI will ensure an exodus of investors from American AI firms and the exodus of AI companies from America to the delight of Bernie’s new Chinese Communist allies. And the idea that putting more money into the hands of the government will “improve the lives of all of us” is a lie that can be discredited by even the briefest visits to the most government subsidized parts of New York City, Chicago or Los Angeles, where generational misery is a fact of life, or conversely to the wealthy bedroom communities of Washington D.C. where the money goes.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, who never managed to successfully hold down a productive job before politics, became a millionaire in ‘public service’. He and his wife have allegedly managed to divert sizable amounts of money and jobs to their children. The difference between Bernie’s wealth and that of Elon Musk is that the senator has done nothing to deserve it except gain power.

Having the government seize 50% of AI will improve the lives of Bernie’s kids, never ours.

In his op-ed, Bernie repeatedly uses Alaska’s Permanent Fund as his model. That’s a better example than he realizes because the PFD has been notorious for its corruption, lack of transparency and general mismanagement. Socialists continue to use Alaska and Norway’s fund, also mentioned by Bernie, as prototypes for universal basic income without considering that areas with low populations and high energy exports are poor models for America.

But if what Bernie really wants is to turn Americans into shareholders, a significant percentage of the country already owns shares of publicly traded companies pursuing AI. Anyone can buy shares in these companies. Furthermore if what Bernie Sanders really wants to do is seize 50% of company stock in the name of the public, he could then propose redistributing the shares.

That’s not what his proposal says. What he’s after is governance and not by the public either.

How successful would AI companies with government governance or in which the government has a significant share be? Apart from being magnets for corruption, something the Sanders family knows quite a bit about, the government takeover of GM cost taxpayers some $10 billion in losses, and its revenues last year were lower than they were in 2006. GM has wasted countless billions on politically correct programs like EVs while failing to compete in the market.

Government governance would kill even the most promising company. Just ask New York City’s Off Track Betting (OTB) which managed to go bankrupt under Mayor David Dinkins, the role model for Mayor Bill de Blasio, who in turn has been the role model for Zohran Mamdani.

But give Bernie credit for a whole other level of ambition by laying claim to the entire creativity of mankind. Individual creative works may draw on the collective knowledge of mankind, but that doesn’t mean that they belong to the government let alone to a politician so uncreative that all he can do is recycle 19th century political cliches and slap them on any modern technology.

AI is dangerous enough without putting it in the hands of Sen. Bernie Sanders or his allies in Communist China who are busy training AI to spot political dissidents in the name of ‘the people’ who are never actually allowed a say in the socialist crimes carried out in their name.

Creativity, like constitutional citizenship, is our individual birthright, not a collective.

That is how millions of farmers were murdered in the Soviet Union, Communist China and across the Communist world. It’s why commissars could tell writers what to write and artists what to paint. When a Soviet judge demanded that Joseph Brodsky tell him, “who recognized you as a poet? Who enrolled you in the ranks of poets?” Brodsky replied with, “No one. And who enrolled me in the ranks of humanity?” His poetry, he argued, came from God.

Sen. Bernie Sanders however believes in another god. His god is the government. All of human history, its creative energies and inventions, are just meant to be sacrificed to his terrible deity.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center’s Front Page Magazine.

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Read my book ‘Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against the Left’ to discover the true origins of the American Left.