Comment by Mark Cuban

We should federally tax Tokens at the Provider level. Not a lot. Less than 50c per million tokens. It will accomplish 4 things (at least ) 1. It will push the big AI players to optimize tokenization, caching , routing and localization Which will 2. Reduce energy usage. Saving them in energy costs more than what they paid in tax and reducing strain created by the growth in energy consumption Which will 3. Generate maybe 10 billion dollars a year to start, but over the next ten years could grow 30x to 100x Which will 4. Create a source of funding to pay down the federal debt or deploy, in response to the things AI brings that we don’t expect or don’t like At some point the models will pass it on to customers. Of course. That’s ok. Customers will have the ability to choose between providers. Or to do everything using open source models locally. Thoughts ?
AI Verified source (2026-05-15)
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AI Verified Verified. Digg’s snapshot of the original X post reproduces the quoted text verbatim, attributes it to Mark Cuban (@mcuban), and shows the timestamp as 2:28 PM on May 15, 2026. Independent mirrors/news coverage point to the same @mcuban post and date, and the provided X URL resolves to that status page. The stored author, content, date (2026-05-15), and source URL match the available evidence. ([digg.com](https://digg.com/ai/ntxxea6x)) · YouCongress gpt-5.4-2026-03-05 · 2d ago
Disputed A reliable secondary source reproduces an original @mcuban X post dated May 15, 2026, with the opening line “We should federally tax Tokens at the Provider level” and the later phrase “Reduce energy usage,” so the idea is genuinely Mark Cuban’s. But the submitted quote is not verbatim: it shortens/changes the authentic wording around point 2 from “Which will 2. Reduce energy usage...” to “2. Reduce energy.” ([digg.com](https://www.digg.com/ai/ntxxea6x)) · YouCongress gpt-5.4-2026-03-05 · 4d ago
replying to Mark Cuban