Nye's Digital Lab is a weekly scribble on creatives in an age of rapid change.

This week I'm looking at Bernie Sanders' plan to tax the AI giants and why I'd rather have a receipt than a check.

A flat 50% tax treats my creative work like oil. A big pile of stuff to be split. What I actually want is a provenance system that can prove a specific idea was mine and route its value back to me.

On June 1, 2026, Bernie Sanders again did what he's pretty good at. He turned a complicated problem into a one-liner.

In a New York Times op-ed he announced the American A.I. Sovereign Wealth Fund Act: a one-time 50% tax on OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI, paid in stock, dropped into a public fund that eventually mails Americans a check.

"A.I. is built on our collective intelligence," he wrote "our books, songs, artwork, journalism... fed into their A.I. models without permission, without acknowledgment, without compensation."

I'm a creative. I know that somewhere in those training sets is the residue of work I made by hand. This can be drawings, code, the way I do something and what hurts, is that nobody asked me. So when Bernie says they took our stuff, we want our cut, I'm with him. I want mine too.

Then I look at the number, and I think about it.

This is not the right way to go about it.

I'm sure this is how they are approaching it.

50% tax treats my data like oil.

Oil is a lump you tax once and split evenly. My work isn't. My work is labor and it's specific to me. If a sketch I made taught a model to animate a character more believably, that one contribution might be doing real work inside the output. A flat tax can't see that. It scoops everything into a "government pile", promises fairness later, and asks me to trust whoever happens to hold the White House with the slush fund.

And we already know the pile doesn't trickle. When the music platforms built "opt-in" royalty pools for artists, the payout landed around four cents per track, per quarter. Four cents, dude. Um... not liking that outcome.

So no, I don't want to be a line item in someone's fund. I appreciate this conversation, and I am glad we are raising the alarm on our data in AI. For me, as a creative, I want my fair share!

Don't tell me we don't have the capability to track things. We already built the surveillance system. We just aimed it at the wrong people.

Adobe logs every prompt you type. Company logs can prove you used AI even when you swear you didn't. The C2PA "Content Credentials" standard (backed by Adobe, OpenAI, and Google) now stamps cryptographic origin data onto generated images, and this August the EU starts requiring it.

I watched a hacker conference on youtube where blockchain engineers showed system maps that blew my mind. We can trace a single satoshi, one hundred-millionth of a Bitcoin, anywhere on Earth.

So, and let me get this right... we can prove who typed a prompt and where a coin went, but not whose work taught the model?

We can start doing this now. And I mean now.

That's the thing I actually want built. Not a tax... sorry I don't think we have the capability to manage that.

I think we need a provenance system.

When my work gets ingested, an immutable receipt rides along with it, and when it generates value downstream, a fraction finds its way home. To me. By name. Cryptographic Secure number that says "Nye made this thing I just stole and put in my AI."

I've been told... It's hard today's metadata falls off the moment you change a file's format, and the blockchain ecosystem just doesn't have it's act together. Fine. Invent something sturdier. We have AI now; point it at this. We can solve this problem, and if we don't. Well. Here's the thing. We won't have an economy, folks.

Bernie did the one thing only Bernie can do: he slammed the table and made the country look up. Appreciate you man, thanks. Fist Bump

But, that's the opening scene, not the ending. The rest is up to the economists, the IP lawyers, and the technologists. Hurry Up!

I don't want 50% of Anthropic. I want the teenie tiny latent space node that was genuinely mine, and a system honest enough to go find it, and then give me credit for it.

Someone, let's build this.

Make it Happen.

Nye Warburton is an artist and educator from Savannah, Georgia.

These essays start as improvisations. Writing is shaped with personalized data sets, Claude agents, and finally edited by hand in Obsidian. Collected essays are available as a printed book at nyewarburton.com/book.

Links, quotes, references

• Bernie Sanders, "Artificial Intelligence," op-ed, New York Times, June 1, 2026.

• Catherina Gioino, "Bernie Sanders wants Americans to own a piece of AI. The Trump White House seems to agree," Fortune, June 3, 2026.

• "Bernie Sanders to introduce bill giving the public a 50% stake in top AI companies," Yahoo Finance.

• "The State of Content Authenticity in 2026," Content Authenticity Initiative.

• "C2PA Adoption Status 2026: Content Credentials, OpenAI & Google," EyeSift.

• "AI Music and Data Attribution: Building a Transparent Future," Soundverse (artist royalty pool figures).

If you are down the rabbit hole on IP tracking, you might like some of my other scribbles on it.

• Royalties, Attribution and the Blockchain - I've been saying this stuff for a while.

• Networks of Trust - On the importance of trust and human connection.

• Universal Basic Compute - On an alternative vision of how AI value should flow back to the people.