The AI Labor Reckoning: Majorities Back a Wealth Fund as Tech Layoffs Accelerate

The AI Labor Reckoning: Majorities Back a Wealth Fund as Tech Layoffs Accelerate

A supermajority of Americans now wants the government to seize half the equity of the country's largest artificial intelligence companies and pool it into a public fund. That is no longer a rhetorical flourish from the left flank of Congress. It is polling. In a national survey of 1,690 adults conducted in June by the research firm Verasight, 69% of respondents said they would support forcing AI firms to transfer half their stock into a public sovereign wealth fund, a finding CNBC reported the week of July 6. The number lands in the middle of the worst year for tech employment on record, and it reads less like abstract policy preference than a verdict on what workers are watching happen around them.

Record profits, shrinking payrolls

The contrast driving public anger is stark. More than 113,000 tech workers have been laid off in 2026 across roughly 179 companies, including Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet. Oracle eliminated 21,000 positions over the past fiscal year, cutting its headcount from 162,000 to 141,000, a 13% reduction, even as its adjusted earnings per share climbed 27%. Salesforce cut jobs across three separate rounds since late 2025 while its AI agent platform, Agentforce, grew revenue more than 200%. Meta laid off 8,000 people while guiding annual capital expenditure as high as $135 billion. Amazon cut 16,000 corporate roles. Microsoft offered buyouts to about 7% of its US workforce and, in early July, cut 4,800 jobs in a single Xbox reorganization.

Record earnings sitting next to shrinking headcounts is the pattern the Verasight numbers are responding to. "In the eyes of the public, AI sovereign funds are seen as a tool to distribute the gains from the AI industry back to broader society," Verasight chief executive Benjamin Leff told CNBC.

Three exits from the same trap

Faced with this, workers are taking three divergent paths.

The first is political. The redistribution mood has a bill behind it: Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) introduced the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act in June, proposing a one-time 50% stock levy on AI companies with more than $200 million in annual receipts, funneled into a fund he estimates could open with roughly $7 trillion in assets. "The future of AI and the fate of humanity must not be decided behind closed doors in Silicon Valley by billionaires seeking to maximize their power and profit," Sanders said when he unveiled the legislation. The bill is unlikely to pass Congress this year, but the 69% figure suggests the idea is not going away quietly.

The second is exit. Fortune this week documented a wave of tech workers choosing early retirement rather than retrain around AI. Jennifer Kerns, who spent more than 30 years in the industry, including 25 as a contractor at Microsoft and later as a program manager at GitHub, retired in March, citing AI becoming the "sole focus" of her workplace. Some who are leaving hold philosophical objections, convinced the technology is "overblown" and skeptical it produces reliable code. Others simply calculate that the learning curve of chasing the next platform is no longer worth it. As a retirement advisor quoted by Fortune framed it, tech workers repeatedly have to decide whether to "jump onto the next tech wave and ride that or not." A growing number are choosing not to.

The third is adaptation. The Guardian this week profiled software engineers responding not by leaving but by reinventing, chasing new skills, going back to programming fundamentals, and, increasingly, pushing for collective action. That last shift is the most novel. A workforce long defined by individual mobility and equity upside is beginning to talk in the language of organizing and bargaining power, a tonal change from the industry's self-image just two years ago.

The social contract is being renegotiated

Underneath all three responses is a fracturing bargain. The tech sector's implicit deal, that disruption would be offset by abundant, well-paid work and the chance to ride the next wave, is failing precisely the people who built it. Goldman Sachs senior economist Joseph Briggs estimates that more than 9% of the US labor force, roughly 15 million workers, could be displaced over a 10-year AI transition. Briggs argues most of that displacement should prove temporary as AI spawns new categories of work, echoing the late-1990s internet shock. But he also warns that if the losses concentrate in a shorter window, unemployment could rise faster than his base case assumes, a risk that matters far more to a worker living through 2026 than to a model averaged over a decade.

Two structural pressures make this reckoning sharper than past automation panics. The first is a senior-engineer drain: early retirements pull decades of institutional knowledge out of firms just as they lean hardest on AI tooling. The second is the collapse of the bottom rung. Entry-level hiring is evaporating as companies conclude that AI agents can do the work once assigned to juniors, even as programs like Anthropic's Claude Corps try to funnel new graduates toward AI-native roles. If neither the top nor the bottom of the career ladder is stable, the resentment captured in the Verasight poll is the predictable result.

Policymakers are only now catching up. The same week the survey circulated, the Federal Reserve stood up five new task forces, including a Productivity and Jobs group charged with assessing "the economic impact of new general-purpose technologies, including artificial intelligence." It is co-led by a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen, Stanford economist Charles I. Jones (currently on leave at Anthropic), and Microsoft executive Asha Sharma, a roster of AI optimists now tasked with modeling the very displacement workers are voting against.

What to watch next

Three signals will show whether this is a moment or a turn. First, whether Sanders' bill draws co-sponsors or dies in committee, and whether any 2026 candidates adopt the wealth-fund framing on the trail. Second, next earnings season, which will reveal whether leaner payrolls actually pay off for firms like Oracle and Salesforce, or whether the trade merely bought a lower stock price. Third, whether software-engineer organizing hardens into anything resembling formal labor structure. The 69% number is a demand for a cut of the upside. The open question is whether workers get one through politics, walk away from the table, or force the terms themselves.