The 2028 presidential race in the United States is shaping up to be the first-ever “AI election.” It will be defined by how candidates propose to cope with the upheaval wrought by the widespread integration of artificial intelligence into society.

Fueled by trillions in investments that are ballooning the stock market, the accelerating advance of AI is already beginning to reveal the scale of productivity gains, wealth generation — and job losses — the future will bring. Localities across the nation are rebelling against data centers sucking up their energy supplies.  Powerful frontier models like Anthropic’s Mythos are deemed so dangerous for their ability to identify software vulnerabilities and potentially enable mass cyberattacks that they are so far restricted to a handful of trusted companies and governments.

As a result, the awakened anxieties of the general public have entered what was once the privileged preserve of Silicon Valley tech bros and venture capitalists who determined the course of innovation.

Recent college commencement speeches even alluding to the benefits of AI have been met with resounding boos by graduates shut out of entry-level jobs that AI can perform better without incurring all the student debt to get there. Pope Leo XIV has joined the fray with his “Magnifica Humanitas” encyclical, calling for the “disarmament” of AIs to ensure that they remain human-centered and controlled. State governments across the ideological spectrum, from California to Florida, are introducing their own regulation in the gaping absence of federal law.

Regulation & Distribution

The discourse going forward will center on two domains — regulation and distribution.

Out of an abundance of caution, the Trump White House has called for the voluntary vetting of frontier models like Mythos before they are released publicly. That sensible move remains opposed by tech accelerationists who argue it will give China a competitive and geopolitically fraught edge absent similar restrictions.

This is why AI safety protocols must be considered a global public good that both AI superpowers agree on and adhere to. Otherwise, neither China nor the U.S. can rest assured in its own security and will angle for an advantage. This was a point made by both Chinese and Western foundational AI scientists when they met at the Berggruen Institute’s Casa dei Tre Oci in Venice in 2024.

With respect to distribution, it is now becoming clear that AI innovations are increasingly decoupling productivity growth and wealth creation from jobs and income. Bank of America Institute analysts found that recent productivity gains are piling up as corporate profits, while labor income is steadily falling as a share of U.S. GDP.

As we have written often in Noema, the value created by intelligent machines is flowing mostly to those tech titans who “own the robots” and to the top 10% who own 93% of all equities. Meanwhile, the value of labor — and its bargaining power to reap a piece of the pie — is rapidly diminishing. Indeed, the public, whose data is exploited to train AI models, generally has no claim to the new wealth created from the raw material of their information.

Lately, this realization has fostered a proliferation of proposals from Democrats, Republicans and Big Tech to more broadly share the vast profits generated by AI. Where they differ is in the ways and means to do so.

These proposals fall into two rough camps: redistribution of income and pre-distribution of wealth. The first involves greater taxation on AI companies and tech billionaires to redistribute their exorbitant income for health and social services, or for a “universal basic income” to compensate for widespread job losses.

Pre-distribution involves policies that ensure the broader public shares ownership of the AI economy in the first place, instead of seeking to patch up inequality by redistributing income after the fact. We have called this “universal basic capital.” The idea is not only to reduce the concentration of wealth at the top, but to build it from below.

Changing Political Winds

A massive shift in public sentiment that has been emerging for months seems to be consolidating.

Writing this in the summer of 2026, the MAGA coalition Donald Trump assembled to win the last election and sweep the Congress appears headed for defeat in the midterm elections.

“AI innovations are increasingly decoupling productivity growth and wealth creation from jobs and income.”

The president’s popularity in polls has fallen to mainly encompass his most ardent core base, at about 34% of the electorate. Alienated youth, Latino citizens, farmers and the left-behind white working class “independents” that put him across the threshold of victory are defecting en masse. They are doing so in the face of the surging cost of living, the failed folly of foreign adventures such as the Iran war and wild self-promotional antics like the Trump arch or the effort to put the president’s image on a $250 bill. With woke extremism and out-of-control immigration now tempered, if not tamed, they are looking elsewhere for a response to their immediate concerns.

This situation portends a real possibility that the Democrats will take over the U.S. Congress and blunt Trump’s lame-duck margin of maneuver. That legislative majority will likely focus on containing or dismantling the damage rather than constructively building for the future.

Once the brush is cleared, the opening will come in the 2028 presidential race. To the extent the Trump slump continues and drags down his successor, the Democratic Party will be where the action is.

Redistribution Versus Pre-distribution

The moribund wanderings of the Democratic Party in the political wilderness since the ascent of MAGA have found a new footing amid the challenges posed by AI.

A mixed bag of redistributive proposals is emerging from Democrats and their allies. The proposed billionaire tax in a California labor-backed ballot initiative would take a one-time 5% bite out of the wealth of mostly tech billionaires to pay for federal cuts to health care coverage in the state. Consumer advocate and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren has put forward a plan to overhaul the tax code so that Big Tech and billionaires “pay their fair share” to fund education, universal health care and unemployment insurance for those displaced by AI.

“Taxing AI is one way we make sure the winnings from AI benefit all Americans, rather than channeling them only to the wealthy few,” Warren wrote recently in Time magazine. “If millions of people lose their jobs to AI, we’ll need the funds to deliver universal health care so those workers are not bankrupted by a visit to the doctor. If AI transforms the future of work, we’ll need to invest in free education and apprenticeships and a new jobs guarantee so that all Americans have good-paying work. And while workers get back on their feet, we’ll need the revenue to bolster unemployment insurance to keep families afloat. The only way we can get there is by overhauling our tax code. …

“Right now, companies pay payroll taxes for their workers but get tax breaks for investing in technology—effectively, a tax penalty for hiring human beings and a tax break for buying equipment. In an AI world, that means our tax code is incentivizing corporations to fire people and replace them with AI. That’s wrong. We need to level the playing field by raising taxes on corporations and capital gains and closing corporate loopholes. One way to tackle those loopholes? Strengthen the minimum tax for billionaire corporations.”

The place to begin, she argues, is an excise tax on large data centers to cushion the rising energy costs for consumers.

On the pre-distribution side, populist firebrand and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is authoring legislation to create an AI Sovereign Wealth Fund “through a one-time 50 percent tax — not on the profits of OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI and other companies, but paid with something far more valuable than that: the stock,” he wrote in an op-ed in The New York Times.

“If passed,” says Sanders, “this legislation would do two crucial things. First, it would give the public a direct role in determining the future of this technology. No longer would the future of A.I. and the transformation of human life that it will bring be dictated by a handful of Big Tech oligarchs. 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.

“Second, this legislation would guarantee that 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. If the big A.I. companies continue to grow as rapidly as many analysts expect, then the value of the sovereign wealth fund will grow as well — and the benefits to the American people will grow along with it.”

“The moribund wanderings of the Democratic Party in the political wilderness since the ascent of MAGA have found a new footing amid the challenges posed by AI.”

In Sanders’ vision, “the billions, if not trillions, of dollars generated by this fund would provide direct payments to the American people. And as the fund generates more and more wealth, the proceeds would be used to ensure that every man, woman and child in our country has a decent and dignified standard of living, including health care, education and housing.”

As the senator points out, even the largest tech companies, such as OpenAI, have themselves proposed a “public wealth fund that provides every citizen — including those not invested in financial markets — with a stake in A.I.-driven economic growth.” Anthropic has also called for the creation of a “national sovereign wealth fund with stakes in A.I.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has proposed seeding the fund with a 2.5% tax on companies above a certain market-capitalization threshold, payable through the transfer of equity.

The tech titan believes such a tax will not hinder technological innovation and wealth creation any more than the payroll tax that all companies presently pay as the cost of doing business. It is the way to capture the value of productivity growth for all of society that is increasingly coming from intelligent machines rather than labor.

Altman proactively initiated a meeting with Sanders about the senator’s proposal, agreeing with its thrust but arguing that a 50% take was too extreme. Also in response to Sanders, President Trump himself, who has previously floated the idea of a national sovereign wealth fund, openly and positively mulled the idea of the public owning equity shares in AI companies. “There is something very interesting about it,” he told reporters on Friday, “where it almost becomes a partnership with the American public.” He further commented that the constituencies that support him and Sanders “are not that far apart.”

The Republican Senator from Texas, Ted Cruz, has chimed in as well. He too agrees with the idea of a public wealth fund but warns against direct government ownership of AI companies and suggests that individual accounts the public may hold should be in the form of index or mutual funds. Other influential Republicans argue that any equity transfers from AI companies to a public fund should be “voluntary.”

In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom, who many consider the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination at this very early stage, has long championed the idea of a “data dividend” and “universal basic capital” through a wealth fund in which individuals and families — not the government — own equity shares in the growing AI economy. His CalKids program is an embryonic form of UBC. It provides up to a $1,500 government deposit into a savings account for every low-income first grader in public schools, which is independently invested by professionals for compounded returns until it can be cashed out at college age.

Newsom, who also signed into California law the first regulation of frontier LLM models in the country and opposes the billionaire tax, argued at a recent forum of the Center for American Progress that “Democrats need to advance beyond ‘tinkering’ and pursue ideas, like universal basic capital.” Even if Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is only half wrong about AI replacing 50% of white-collar jobs, he says, we are on the road to precarity for working people. Like Warren, he argues that the industrial-age payroll tax incentivizes replacing labor with machines, while capital is subsidized by tax breaks. “The rapid advancement in AI,” he warned, will “‘detonate’ the prevailing order.”

“Now it’s the blue-collar worker that sounds a lot like 25-year-old white-collar workers I see in San Francisco, wondering why they’re not getting a callback on a job interview — they’re sounding the same,” Newsom said. “That’s a new coalition.”

The distinction between redistribution and pre-distribution is critical and will determine whether wealth is shared more broadly by all, or whether only the income of those at the top is redistributed, leaving the structural dynamic of inequality in place.

Trump Has Laid The Groundwork

Hopefully, the wiser minds among the Democratic coalition will forge a compromise that retains features of redistribution to help correct extant inequalities while recognizing that a fair future in the AI economy must entail a pre-distributive sharing of wealth ownership. Assets should be held directly through individual and family accounts, not by the government.

“A fair future in the AI economy must entail a pre-distributive sharing of wealth ownership. Assets should be held directly through individual and family accounts, not by the government.”

In reaching that compromise, Democrats should build on what the Trump administration and MAGA Congress have already pioneered.

The Money Accounts for Growth and Advancement that Trump initiated — which provides a $1,000 deposit into a personal account for every citizen under 8 years old that will grow with compounded returns over time through investments in the market — can serve as a foundational platform for a broader form of universal basic capital as a key pillar of the social contract in the AI age.

As Newsom argues, AI is changing the way the world works so profoundly that “tinkering” is no longer effective. It is time for a wholesale restructuring of the political economy that meets the scale and scope of AI disruption and steers its trajectory toward the common good. As the next presidential election approaches, the American public is clearly ready for this idea; its time has come.