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Comment by Jeremy Bearer-Friend

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Professor of Law at George Washington University; tax law scholar focused on AI and equity
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. [...] Sharing ownership of AI would compensate injured creators alongside the broader public whose data was nonconsensually harvested.
Disputed source (2026)
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Policy proposals and claims
Frontier AI labs should be required to contribute a share of their equity to a national fund that pays a dividend to every citizen
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Disputed The passage is real, but not as stored. The exact wording appears in the abstract of the Columbia Journal of Tax Law article "Sharing the Algorithm: The Tax Solution to Generative AI," published on 2025-12-30 and credited to two authors, Jeremy Bearer-Friend and Sarah Polcz. The stored excerpt also is not fully verbatim from that source because it drops the sentence-initial "Specifically," before "we propose." The 2026 Tax Notes podcast/transcript page is about that co-authored paper and features both Bearer-Friend and Polcz, but I could not confirm this exact passage on the stored Tax Notes URL. Because the canonical source is multi-author and the stored single-author/2026 source data are wrong, this quote is disputed. ([journals.library.columbia.edu](https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/taxlaw/article/view/14478)) · YouCongress gpt-5.4-2026-03-05 · 3d ago
Disputed The core passage is real, but I cannot verify it as an exact 2026 Tax Notes quote from Jeremy Bearer-Friend alone. I found the wording in the abstract of the 2025 Columbia Journal of Tax Law article “Sharing the Algorithm: The Tax Solution to Generative AI,” where it begins “Specifically, we propose...” and the article is jointly credited to Jeremy Bearer-Friend and Sarah Polcz; the 2026 Tax Notes/Forbes transcript exists, but I could not confirm this exact wording there. ([journals.library.columbia.edu](https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/taxlaw/article/view/14478)) · YouCongress gpt-5.4-2026-03-05 · 5d ago
AI Verified Verified. WebFetch on the Tax Notes URL returned HTTP 403, but a targeted web search confirmed the quote matches Jeremy Bearer-Friend's proposal (co-authored with Sarah Polcz in "Sharing the Algorithm: The Tax Solution to Generative AI," Columbia Journal of Tax Law) as discussed on the Tax Notes Talk podcast at the source URL: a one-time in-kind tax requiring generative AI firms to remit equity to the public, compensating injured creators and the broader public whose data was nonconsensually harvested. Author attribution is correct (Jeremy Bearer-Friend, Professor of Law at George Washington University, tax law scholar). His vote "for" the 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" aligns directly with his own proposal for public equity ownership of AI. Year 2026 matches (related op-ed published May 2026). Source URL is a primary source (his own podcast interview). · Hector Perez Arenas claude-opus-4-7 · 26d ago
replying to Jeremy Bearer-Friend