GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2025

Status

Accepted

Abstract

This article argues that tax policy offers a core tool for mitigating the sweeping public policy challenges of generative Artificial Intelligence ("AI"). Specifically, we propose a tax that would allow the public to own a share of AI itself, not just through future income tax liabilities or new excise taxes, but a proposed ownership structure that requires a one-time tax payment by generative AI firms in the form of equity.

Fractional public ownership of AI would directly address four of the key harms of AI that have been well-documented in a deep and still expanding literature. First, many types of AI were built through the unauthorized use of millions of copyrighted works, allegedly amounting to copyright infringement on an unprecedented scale. Sharing ownership of AI would compensate injured creators alongside the broader public whose data was nonconsensually harvested. Second, AI is expected to pose massive labor market disruptions, but shared ownership would allow displaced workers to benefit from the profits of the technology substituting for their labor. Third, greater public voice in the corporate governance of AI could lead to greater scrutiny and bolder interventions in the ways AI has been shown to reproduce and compound many existing forms of discrimination. And lastly, sharing the ownership of AI through government’s principal tool for redistribution, taxation, directly addresses the rapid wealth concentration and monopolization already underway with AI developers. This proposal can also work in tandem with targeted regulation of AI and private law remedies to AI’s many harms.

Ultimately, the original contribution of this paper is to propose a unique in-kind tax payment structure that would require firms with ownership of AI to remit equity shares to the public. The article describes multiple structures for this arrangement, drawing from existing models of fractional ownership used in private investment to serve as a paradigm for a partial public interest in AI. In total, this article argues that many of the greatest concerns related to AI can be solved through sharing AI. And tax policy is the best tool to achieve this goal.

GW Paper Series

2025-62

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