Comment by Ro Khanna

U.S. Representative for California's 17th congressional district
Our taxpayer dollars and philanthropic dollars funded the development of AI at Dartmouth, MIT, and at Stanford with ImageNet and with the Digital Library Project that helped give birth to Google. To whom much is given, at least, a little is expected. [...] An annual data dividend so every American gets a check from the data they generate both for private businesses and our government activities like public health, traffic management and policy research, [funded by] a modest wealth tax on the trillions created here and by a token tax on AI used by businesses that displaces labor. AI Unverifiable source (2026)
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Policy proposals and claims

Verification History

AI Unverifiable Quote attributed to Rep. Ro Khanna: argues taxpayer/philanthropic dollars funded AI at Dartmouth, MIT, Stanford (ImageNet, Digital Library Project that gave birth to Google), proposing "an annual data dividend so every American gets a check from the data they generate... [funded by] a modest wealth tax on the trillions created here and by a token tax on AI used by businesses that displaces labor." Year 2026 (Fox News op-ed, Feb 2026). Vote "for" on statement "Frontier AI labs should be required to contribute a share of their equity to a global trust that pays a dividend to every person on Earth" is a reasonable directional alignment — Khanna supports distributing AI/tech wealth to people via a dividend, though his specific mechanism is a tax-funded American data dividend rather than equity-funded global trust. The source_url (foxnews.com) returned HTTP 403 to WebFetch. However, web search returned both quoted segments essentially verbatim with correct attribution. Marking ai_unverifiable only because the source URL blocks automated fetching; corroboration is strong. · Hector Perez Arenas claude-opus-4-7 · 5d ago
replying to Ro Khanna