This letter took shape during the recent AI, Families, and the Common Good seminar. Capita, which convened the gathering, is now helping carry the effort forward—coordinating on behalf of some participants and the broader community of allies who wish to lend their support. Attendance at the seminar does not constitute endorsement of this letter; not all participants have signed. The letter reflects the views of its signatories alone.
June 17, 2026
The Honorable Bernie Sanders
United States Senate
332 Dirksen Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C., 20510
Sen. Sanders:
We write regarding the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act and to commend the premise beneath it: artificial intelligence is built upon the accumulated knowledge, labor, and creativity of the whole people, and any potential benefit it brings to humanity is therefore a common inheritance rather than the private windfall of a few.
AI is not merely a story about a handful of remarkable and potentially very wealthy companies and the people building them; it is an infrastructure revolution — data centers, energy, chips, and networks — of the same character as electrification and the internet itself. And like the internet, whose foundations were laid by decades of public research, this revolution rests on a foundation built and paid for by the American people. That fact strengthens the public’s claim to ownership, but it also carries a design implication: a fund conceived only as a stake in company equity will mistake the market’s verdict for the public’s stake. Equity valuations may rise and fall; the infrastructure beneath them is what will shape American life for a century, just as it mattered enormously, county by county, who got electricity and broadband and when they got it. The question of who is connected to AI’s infrastructure, on what terms, and at what price, will determine which families and communities can participate in the prosperity it creates. A wisely designed fund would hold a stake in that layer too, and treat extending it to every community, as rural electrification did during the New Deal, as central to its mandate.
We are community leaders, philanthropic funders, business leaders committed to broadly shared prosperity, authors, journalists, and community organizers who work directly with families, especially those furthest from opportunity. It is on their behalf that we write to you today to propose two guiding principles for the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund — and, indeed, for all policies governing AI — to ensure that the gains of this technology reach the families furthest from opportunity.
- The family, which the Universal Declaration of Human Rights describes as the “fundamental group unit of society,” not simply the individual citizen or worker, must be considered in the design of the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund. AI carries real risks for families, workforce volatility, economic hardship, and harms to family mental health and children’s social development. But mitigating harm is not enough. The Fund should be explicitly charged with connecting every family, and especially those furthest from opportunity, to the prosperity AI creates. Metrics of success can include family economic stability and child well-being, not only equity returns.
- Cash must be prioritized. Whatever else the fund finances, its first instrument for families should be money — direct, unconditional, and as close to cash as possible. The evidence here is strong: from the Alaska Permanent Fund to the 2021 expanded Child Tax Credit, which cut child poverty nearly in half in a single year, families furthest from opportunity reliably convert cash into precisely the goods policy otherwise tries to engineer: stable housing, food security, schooling, the move to a better labor market, and the small enterprise. Cash respects families as the best judges of their own needs.
But structure matters as much as substance. Payments should be designed as floors, not windfalls: monthly rather than annual lump sums, predictable, and weighted toward households with children. A reliable monthly floor provides the insurance that an annual check cannot. Cash is what allows a parent to take a better job, leave an unsafe situation, or start a business, because the family can plan around it and survive a setback. Delivery must be automatic, through tax and birth records, with no application to file: every form, waiting list, and verification requirement is a regressive time tax, falling hardest on families with the lowest margin of both time and money.
A fund designed on these principles would be a durable instrument of broadly shared prosperity, dignifying the humanity of every family and their contribution to the common good.
We respectfully ask that these two principles, family as the unit of design and cash as the primary instrument, be reflected in the legislation. We welcome the opportunity to discuss them with you or your staff as the legislation develops.
Sincerely,
*Organizational names are given for identification purposes only.
Michelle Adkins, Director, PN-3 Capacity-Building Hub / BUILD
Rhian Allvin, CEO, Brynmor Early Education & Preschool
Erin Arango-Escalante, Founder & Principal, All Children Thrive
Vinny Badolato, Founder and President, Quartz Strategies
Elana Banin, Multifaith Alliance
Melissa Boteach, Chief Policy Officer, ZERO TO THREE
Shyy Brown, Finance and Administrative Director, Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families
Dominique Charlot-Swilley, Georgetown University, Thrive Center
Melissa Colagrosso, Board Chair, Together We Grow
Thomas DiGenno, Program Director, Richard E. and Nancy P. Marriott Foundation
Elizabeth Erickson, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, Duke
Rina Gratz, Director of Early Childhood Policy and Practice, Prichard Committee
Elliot Haspel, Senior Fellow, Capita
Matthew Henry, Senior Director Government Solutions, TOOTRiS
Anya Kamenetz, Author
Kristen Kinchla, Research Associate, Maine Children’s Alliance
Adam Lavitt, Director of Learning, Jewish Studio Project
LaDon Love, Executive Director, SPACEs In Action
Lori McDonald, Game designer and educator
Matthew Melmed, Executive Director, ZERO TO THREE
Dr Dwight Sanders, Federal Reserve 4, U.S. Federal Marshals
Richard Sheward, Director of System Implementation Strategies, Children’s HealthWatch
Keesa Smith-Brantley, Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families
Joe Waters, Co-founder and CEO, Capita
Atiya Weiss, Burke Foundation
David W Willis, MD, Founder and Director, Nurture Connection
Joscha Wirtz, Sociopúblico
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