Everyone Wants to Tax A.I. The Big Disagreement: How?

Source Domain: www.nytimes.com

Artificial intelligence is making some people rich and others feel left out. Unsurprisingly, then, proposals to tax A.I. for the benefit of the public are multiplying like the fingers on an A.I.-generated hand. Some make sense. Others, not so much.

Giant initial public offerings have intensified interest in the tax proposals. Trading began this week in SpaceX — now merged with Elon Musk’s xAI — which went public at a valuation of $1.77 trillion. Anthropic filed confidentially for its own I.P.O. on June 1, days after a funding round valued it at $900 billion before the inclusion of new capital. OpenAI, which filed confidentially on June 8, was valued at $730 billion after a funding round this year.

Investors in artificial intelligence are paying a lot for shares because they envision a world in which A.I. systems take over more and more of the work that people do today. If that happens, though, federal taxes on wages and salaries could dry up along with jobs. That’s an existential threat to the government — and by extension, to nonbillionaire taxpayers.

One idea is for ordinary citizens to become participants in the A.I. boom. President Trump said Wednesday he plans to meet with tech executives to discuss their “giving something back to the public,” without specifying how that might happen. “If we do that, the public will become very rich,” he promised.

Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, is going further, planning to introduce a bill imposing a one-time tax on leading A.I. companies that would give the public half of their shares, to be placed in a sovereign wealth fund modeled on Alaska’s, which collects oil dividends.

Trouble is, the objectives of the various tax proposals aren’t always clear. If the main concern is that A.I. development is moving too fast, for example, the Sanders and Trump plans are not obviously fit for purpose. They would give the federal government a strong financial interest in promoting the growth of A.I….

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