Senator Elizabeth Warren Proposes Taxing AI to Fund Social Programs Senator Elizabeth Warren is pushing a sweeping new plan to tax artificial intelligence and its infrastructure, arguing that the technology’s gains are flowing to a small elite while economic risks spread to everyone else.

Early warnings about AI and inequality

In a Time op-ed published Wednesday, Warren warns that Americans are “hanging on by their fingernails in an economy that funnels wealth to the ultra-rich and leaves crumbs for working people,” and that AI threatens to “supercharge this divide.” She cites tech executives who have cautioned that AI could create “a level of wealth concentration that will break society” and even a “permanent underclass.”

Warren links these fears to concrete pressures already emerging around AI infrastructure. She points to AI data centers that are “jacking up utility bills,” with some families near large facilities seeing electricity costs rise by as much as 267% in five years, prompting protests and local moratorium fights.

The tax overhaul proposal

Building on those concerns, Warren argues the tax code currently “penalizes hiring people through payroll taxes while subsidizing investments in technology,” a structure she calls “wrong.” Her proposal would “level the playing field” by raising corporate and capital gains taxes and closing corporate loopholes.

She also calls for a wealth tax on billionaires, explicitly naming figures like Jeff Bezos and Sam Altman, and a “reasonable” excise tax on the energy usage of AI data centers. The revenue, she argues, should fund universal health care, free education, job guarantees, and stronger unemployment insurance so that “the winnings from AI benefit all Americans, rather than channeling” to a few.

Competing visions of an AI future

Warren frames the plan as both economic and political, describing it as a response to an AI boom that is “creating dozens of tech billionaires, while companies are laying off workers in the name of AI” and fueling a potential financial bubble. She says policymakers must not only regulate AI’s risks but also “tax AI and invest in people” to “build a country that works for everyone.”

Her proposal adds to a growing progressive push to confront AI’s concentrated gains, setting up an intensifying debate over whether taxing AI is a safeguard for workers or a threat to innovation.

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