Senator Bernie Sanders just dropped a bombshell bill that would force AI companies pulling in over $200 million a year to hand over 50 percent of their equity to a sovereign wealth fund. And the legal mind behind the proposal? Sarah Polcz, a UC Davis law professor — and the wife of Adam Brown, who leads Google DeepMind's Blueshift team.
The fund, run by a bipartisan seven-member committee appointed by the president, would not only get to appoint directors to these AI firms but also distribute annual dividends of about 5 percent to every American citizen — roughly $1,000 per person per year, according to the proposal.
Unsurprisingly, the venture capital crowd is panicking. Critics argue the massive equity grab would scare away the private capital needed to train the next generation of models. But Polcz and co-author Jeremy Bearer-Friend counter that large language models are trained on the internet's collective output — trillions of tokens of humanity's data — so the public deserves a piece of the pie as owners rather than just consumers.
The proposal has some support from within the AI community. Joel Shor, a former Google researcher and ex-head of machine learning at Deep Genomics, backs the idea, saying that among engineers there's growing reflection on how models are built and who gets rich from them.
There's also a fascinating personal connection to Silicon Valley's inner circle. Polcz and Brown's social network runs deep: Google co-founder Sergey Brin once decided to return to Google at a party hosted at their home. After the bill was announced, Brown joined Polcz for champagne at the Rosewood Hotel on Sand Hill Road, the heart of venture capital country.
Brown declined to comment on the legislation, but Polcz clarified that her husband's work at DeepMind focuses strictly on improving AI's scientific and reasoning capabilities — he has no policy stance on how society should deal with the technology's impact.