US House Democrats Propose AI Tax That Rises With Unemployment

A group of Democratic members of the US Congress has introduced the AI Tax and Work Protection Act, a bill that would impose a tax on large AI companies directly tied to the country's unemployment rate. The more Americans lose their jobs, the higher the levy that companies selling tokens and services based on language models would have to pay.

The bill sets out a dual mechanism for calculating the tax. An AI company would pay either a percentage of the value of tokens sold, the basic units in which language models process data, or a percentage of revenue from AI-based products and services, whichever amount is higher. This applies not only to the major labs building models from scratch, but also to companies that deploy or modify existing models if they use them to automate work and cut jobs.

Rate rises with unemployment

The centerpiece of the bill is the mechanism for automatically raising the rate. As long as US unemployment stays at 5 percent or below, the tax remains at its base level. Above that threshold, the rate climbs in proportion to the rise in unemployment, meaning the worse the job market gets, the higher the levy AI companies must pay. The bill's authors want this to function as an automatic stabilizer that kicks in precisely when the effects of AI replacing workers become most severe.

The tax revenue would go to a newly created Work Protection Administration under the Department of Labor. Its job would be to award grants to states, cities, counties, tribes, unions, nonprofits and educational institutions to create jobs, including in housing construction, infrastructure, child and elder care, and public education.

A nod to the New Deal

Casar, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, explicitly cites the Works Progress Administration, the 1930s government agency that, as part of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, employed millions of Americans on public works during the Great Depression. The bill is meant as a response to a similar risk, only this time triggered not by a financial crash but by automation driven by artificial intelligence.

We won't let AI billionaires get rich by taking jobs away from millions of Americans - Greg Casar, congressman (D-Texas)

If artificial intelligence is profiting from human labor, workers deserve job security and a share of those profits - Sara Jacobs, congresswoman (D-California)

Industry reaction

AI industry figures themselves are not unanimously opposed to the idea of taxation. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has previously spoken in favor of roughly a 3 percent tax on revenue from model usage, and DuckDuckGo founder Gabriel Weinberg has said he would be willing to pay a levy as high as 10 percent. Bill Gates has for months publicly pushed for taxing robots and AI systems that replace human labor, arguing that without such a mechanism, government budgets will lose revenue from payroll taxes.

Casar's bill goes further than most previous proposals by tying the tax rate directly to a hard macroeconomic indicator rather than leaving it to discretionary adjustment by Congress. This is meant to reduce the risk that the issue dies in committee as soon as the job market stabilizes temporarily.

What it means for Poland

For now, the bill has little chance of moving quickly through the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, but it signals a direction for a debate that will sooner or later reach Europe and Poland as well. Domestic tech companies relying on models from US providers could feel the effects indirectly in the future if similar tax mechanisms start driving up the cost of token licenses or API services.

In Poland, discussion of taxing automation is still in its infancy, even though the issue of job losses caused by AI keeps appearing in industry reports. The American bill, even if it isn't passed in its current form, could become a reference point for similar proposals raised by unions and think tanks on this side of the Atlantic.