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
Video Inside the 'good, bad and unthinkable' of artificial intelligence Fox News anchor Bret Baier explores how the technology is changing how the world operates on 'Special Report.'
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.
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