Michigan Democrat Abdul el Sayed, who is running for Senate, supports a proposal from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) that calls for public ownership of artificial intelligence companies.On Tuesday, the progressive candidate said the government should regulate AI firms like public utility companies because the advanced technology could potentially be disastrous for humanity.“I hear folks who say, ‘Well, that seems pretty intense, we wouldn’t do that in almost any other industry,’” el Sayed told Bridge Michigan. “But no other industry has the potential to fundamentally change the nature of the social contract, or cause human demise to the level that AI is offering.”
In a New York Times op-ed earlier this month, Sanders proposed that the government take a 50% ownership stake in OpenAI, Anthropic, and other AI companies to be held in a sovereign wealth fund. The fund would be created through a Sanders-led bill, called the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act. The senator has not yet introduced the legislation.
“The federal government would have the power, through its voting shares and an equal representation on each company’s board, to block decisions that hurt our citizens and to push for policies that help them,” Sanders wrote.
