Tax the Bots

I was on CNBC last week talking about AI and jobs. I painted a foreboding picture of corporate layoffs that have just kicked off. Indeed, Oracle and Amazon just announced that they would likely cut more than 30,000 workers between them. One of the anchors, Becky Quick, asked me,

“So what do we do?”

I answered, “We generally tax things we want less of. In this situation, we want to preserve labor in every corner and environment. So we should stop taxing labor and instead take the advice of Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, and start taxing AI.” This could be used to fund Universal Basic Income among other measures.

Dario Amodei, in the past number of weeks, has been saying two things: First, his company, which produces Claude, is going to automate up to 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs in the next several years. Second, he thinks his company should be taxed on it. He suggests a 3% of revenue ‘token tax,’ which could raise billions very quickly.

That’s right, one of the biggest AI CEOs thinks we should tax his company.

Why don’t legislators take him up on this suggestion?

Right now, lawmakers lack any real vision for how to deal with AI except to cheerlead and pave the way for data centers. The AI lobby has compiled $185 million, which makes them a feared industry to get on the wrong side of.

Meanwhile, the favorability rate of AI among Americans is only 26%. This is lower than, for example, the rating for ICE.

The argument I made on CNBC is that a popular backlash is coming and some kind of sensible taxing of AI is going to be necessary. The argument that “we can’t interfere with the AI industry for fear of losing the competition to China” ignores the facts that 1. This competition won’t be won on the last dollar spent, but on the models’ abilities to improve themselves and whether there’s a real moat and 2. Chinese and American AI are already separating into two ecosystems and spheres of influence.

My comments on CNBC went viral, in part because of both the logic and the appeal. Who would be mad at taxing AI instead of people, especially when at least one of the companies is literally asking for it? It would make both workers and employers happy and put more money into people’s hands. It would also help preserve millions of jobs in a time when that should be the top priority. Whether our putative leaders can understand this vision and make it happen is one of the big questions; it may be that someone has to force their hand.

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