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On February 20th, I was at Stanford University with Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. to speak to over 1,600 students about the defining issues of our time: inequality and AI. We had the largest turnout since President Barack Obama visited the campus in 2015. I laid out my vision for a new tech social contract and seven seminal principles for a more democratic AI. Here is the essence of what I had to say.
We live in a new gilded age. Tech billionaires, believing they would have been heroic conquerors in a different era, are wresting control of our economy, our media, and our politics.
Most Americans feel they have little say in shaping their own future or that of their kids. This has contributed to anger, resentment, and a hopeless cynicism in places across our nation.
A nation cannot survive with islands of prosperity and seas of despair.
Professor Gabriel Zucman has shown that today’s wealth concentration is at the highest it has been in our nation’s history. About 19 billionaires have 3.4 trillion — the equivalent of 12.5 percent of all the goods and services that are produced in the U.S. in a year. This is nearly three times more than the wealthiest Americans were worth relative to the size of the economy at the peak of the Gilded Age.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., speaks next to Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., at a town hall event on February 20, 2026, in Stanford, California. (Benjamin Fanjoy/Getty Images)
Extreme wealth forms an unholy alliance with power leading to two tiers of justice and stripping ordinary citizens of an equal voice in our democratic experiment.
We see the future from here. We know what is coming in a way most politicians and D.C. bureaucrats simply can’t see. And the question we need to ask ourselves is this: What kind of future are we going to build? Will this future be only for the tech lords or for all of us?
We convened this town hall at the epicenter of this wealth concentration and AI innovation. The 50-mile radius around my district which includes Stanford, Apple, Google, Nvidia, Broadcom, and Tesla is worth over $18 trillion. Their market capitalization is nearly 1/3 of the entire US stock market. One-third of our nation’s wealth originates here and in the one surrounding Congressional district.
Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., sits at a town hall event on February 20, 2026 in Stanford, California. The town hall’s theme was “Who Controls the Future of Al: The Oligarchs or The People?” (Benjamin Fanjoy/Getty Images)
We see the future from here. We know what is coming in a way most politicians and D.C. bureaucrats simply can’t see. And the question we need to ask ourselves: What kind of future are we going to build? Will this future be only for the tech lords or for all of us?
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That is why I am calling for a new tech social contract. To whom much is given, at least, a little is expected.
The truth is our taxpayer dollars and philanthropic dollars funded the development of AI at Dartmouth, MIT, and at Stanford with ImageNet and with the Digital Library Project that helped give birth to Google.
Let us acknowledge that tech entrepreneurs have taken risks and shown skill and imagination in scaling and adopting the technology. But just like every successful generation of American entrepreneurs over the past two centuries, they stand on a foundation of public investment.
Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., speaks at a town hall event on February 20, 2026, in Stanford, California. (Benjamin Fanjoy/Getty Images)
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That is why we must ask not what America can do for Silicon Valley, but what Silicon Valley must do for America.
The AI revolution can help cure cancer and rare disease, slash housing costs, make it easier to start businesses and factories, address our energy needs, and lower medical and educational costs for the working class.
But in the hands of a few billionaires, the priority is to eliminate jobs, extract profits, and addict us to outrageous content that turns us from citizens to combatants.
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I am not an AI accelerationist.
I am not an AI doomer.
I am an AI democratist.
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So I want to lay out seven principles for what a democratic AI looks like. This vision is part of a broader call of patriotic renewal to have shared prosperity in our nation, not oligarchic capture and dominance. I have a vision for a new economic patriotism where we have a thriving middle class with good jobs in rural communities, factory towns, suburban neighborhoods and our urban centers.
Here is what that means for AI in America.
First, we must keep humans in the loop.
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We need real protections against mass displacement, beginning with our 3.5 million truck drivers. Even as self-driving trucks improve safety and efficiency, human drivers must remain just like pilots must still fly our planes. This will allow us to develop AI that augments human capability instead of eliminating jobs.
Second, every large company must bargain with its workers.
Unions or elected representatives should ensure displaced workers move into new value-creating roles and can share in AI’s productivity gains through higher wages, profit sharing, and shorter workweeks.
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Third, we have to fix the tax code’s anti-human bias.
Robots get accelerated depreciation while hiring humans comes with payroll taxes. Nobel Laureate Daron Acemoglu estimates that companies pay about zero tax on digital tools, while paying something like 30% in taxes between employers and employees when they hire workers. This makes no sense. We must make it easier to hire workers, not AI agents.
We also need to create an annual data dividend so every American gets a check from the data they generate both for private businesses and our government activities like public health, traffic management and policy research.
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Fourth, we must launch a Future Workforce Administration.
We should seize this moment of anxiety among white-collar and blue-collar families alike and answer it with the boldest, most patriotic jobs agenda in generations.
Funded by a modest wealth tax on the trillions created here and by a token tax on AI used by businesses that displaces labor, this program will put Americans to work in public service. The initiative will drive moonshot projects that expand the frontiers of science, clean energy, and biotech.
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It will mobilize young people to rebuild towns, teach our children, provide childcare and eldercare, and strengthen small businesses in every community.
And we will launch 1,000 new trade schools and tech institutes—so the next generation are prepared for careers AI can’t replace.
Fifth, data centers must serve the communities who power them.
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Right now, data centers are one way extraction centers from communities to the wealthiest corporations.
That must end.
Tech companies need to provide local communities with compute resources for schools and libraries, create local tech jobs and fund startups, and use renewable energy and dry cooling technology. We should look to what Singapore has done with their data centers for a balanced solution and invest in massively increasing the supply of clean energy. Most importantly, tech companies must pay their full electricity bills instead of shifting costs onto our communities.
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Sixth, we must prevent AI from weaponizing our public discourse.
We can unite across party lines to stop engagement-driven algorithms from spreading hate. End Section 230 protection for amplified violent content and require platforms to open up so Americans can connect freely across them.
Seventh, we must regulate AI so it is used to improve humanity, not damage it.
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We need clear enforceable guardrails with mandatory third-party verification of advanced AI models, so this powerful technology does not cause serious societal harm. It needs to be more than the voluntary collaboration taking place at the Center for AI Standards and Innovation at NIST at Commerce. We need a robust federal agency to regulate AI like we regulate nuclear energy or federal aviation.
We need a program with the boldness and scale of the New Deal, a democratic project for our time. Not to slow innovation, but to ensure its benefits reach every American.
The United States will benefit with access to global markets for our AI models by ensuring their safety –– preventing agentic AI from doing harm — and data privacy.
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These principles are the beginning of a framework to ensure that AI does not usher in a level of wealth and power concentration that further rips our democracy apart. If we continue with the status quo or adopt poll-tested incrementalism, we will leave ordinary Americans out in the cold and modern prosperity will be only for the privileged.
I will not sit by and watch that happen.
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We need a program with the boldness and scale of the New Deal, a democratic project for our time. Not to slow innovation, but to ensure its benefits reach every American. A program that, by its very substance, says –– there will be no surrender to tech lords. None. Only a reclaiming of AI for the American people.
And so, my challenge to Stanford students –– emerging technology and business leaders –– is simple. The future must not be written by AI agents that serve San Francisco billionaires. Like at any other pivotal moment in American history, it must be written by all of us, together, in a way that binds our divides and gives us a new national purpose of economic renewal and independence for every American in every place of our beloved nation.
This op-ed is adapted from Rep. Ro Khanna’s remarks at a town hall event at Stanford University with Sen. Bernie Sanders on February 20, 2026.
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