A senator's bill would tax AI companies to pay for the jobs they replace

A bill to make AI pay for the jobs it takes

Senator Mark Kelly, Democrat of Arizona, has put a price on one of the most-repeated fears about artificial intelligence: that it will destroy jobs faster than the economy can replace them. On 25 September 2026 he introduced the Make AI Work for Americans Act, which would create a federal trust called the AI Horizon Fund to help workers displaced by AI, and would pay for it by taxing the companies building the technology.

The premise is blunt. If AI delivers the productivity gains its makers promise, some of that value should be routed back to the people it puts out of work. Kelly's framing, in his own words, leaves little doubt about the theory of the case: he says AI "could unlock benefits for the American people, from curing diseases to solving big engineering problems that unlock new industries and new jobs. But we can't expect corporations to help us out of the goodness of their hearts."

Where the money would come from

The fund would be seeded with an initial $30 billion appropriation, which Kelly's office says would be repaid to the Treasury over time. The repayment, and the fund's ongoing budget, would come from three new taxes aimed squarely at the AI industry: a tax on digital advertising revenues, an AI-usage tax based on the data these systems generate, and an "excess profits" tax on AI firms. In other words, the companies that gain the most from automation would be the ones funding the cushion for the workers it displaces.

Control of the money would sit with a 15-member Artificial Intelligence Advisory Council, made up of non-federal experts drawn from AI, labor, higher education and workforce development. The fund's stated purpose is to serve workers across their careers, from first-time jobseekers to people with decades of experience, by expanding existing training, education, research and labor-market programs rather than building new bureaucracy from scratch.

An unusual coalition, and a lonely bill

The politics are more interesting than the mechanics. A bill that taxes big technology companies would normally draw their opposition. This one lists Microsoft among its supporters, alongside the Teamsters union, the Gila River Indian Community, and the mayors of Phoenix and Tucson, Kate Gallego and Regina Romero. A tech giant backing a tax on AI, and a major union lining up beside it, is the kind of coalition that does not form around empty gestures.

And yet, as introduced, the Make AI Work for Americans Act has no co-sponsors. It arrived during what Nextgov described as a deluge of AI-focused measures on Capitol Hill this week, including a separate proposal to create a federal Department of Artificial Intelligence. Most bills introduced this way never reach a committee vote, let alone the floor. The gap between a serious-looking proposal and a lonely one is exactly this: whether other members sign on.

Will it go anywhere

Read honestly, this is more signal than statute. One senator's bill with no co-sponsors, floated into a crowded field of AI legislation, is a long way from law, and nothing here suggests a fast track. The tax design alone, three new levies on a politically powerful industry, would face heavy resistance in any Congress, and the AI companies that are not named as supporters have every reason to fight it.

But the signal is real. The debate over AI and jobs has spent two years stuck at the level of predictions and podcasts. A named bill with a dollar figure, a funding mechanism and a governance structure moves it into the vocabulary of appropriations and tax policy, where laws actually get made. Whether or not this particular text survives, it is a marker of where the argument is heading, and it borrows the same instinct behind harder rules elsewhere, from the European Union's phased AI Act deadlines to the running fight over whether the industry can be left to police itself.

Our take

Treat the AI Horizon Fund as a proposal to watch, not a policy to plan around. The specifics are genuinely novel: taxing AI usage and excess profits to bankroll worker transition is a concrete answer to a question the industry usually waves away, and the Microsoft-and-Teamsters coalition hints that the idea is not fringe. The reality check is just as important. No co-sponsors, a skeptical Congress, and a tax fight with some of the best-funded companies on earth make near-term passage unlikely. What matters is that the AI-and-jobs reckoning now has legislative language attached to it. The number to remember is not $30 billion. It is zero, the current co-sponsor count, and how fast it moves off that line.