Sam Altman’s ‘New Deal’ for Superintelligence: Visionary Policy or Regulatory Nihilism?

There’s a strange irony in watching the company most responsible for accelerating the AI revolution publish a policy paper begging the world to slow down and rethink its tax code. That’s essentially what happened this week, when OpenAI dropped a thirteen-page document calling for a public wealth fund, a robot tax, and a four-day workweek — a sort of New Deal for the AI age, written by the very people making the old deal feel obsolete.

The timing was unsettling. The paper landed days before someone hurled a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s San Francisco home at 3:45 in the morning. Police arrested the suspect within hours. No one was hurt, but the symbolism was hard to miss. Hours later, Altman sat down and wrote something rare for a tech CEO: an admission. “The fear and anxiety about AI is justified,” he wrote. The man building the future was, in effect, conceding that the future is scaring people in ways that may not be entirely irrational.

The suspect, later identified as Daniel Alejandro Moreno-Gama, had reportedly spent months writing online about AI as an existential threat, calling Altman a “pathological liar” in a series of Substack posts. He’d also been active in PauseAI’s Discord, where in December he wrote, “We are close to midnight, it’s time to actually act.” A moderator banned him. It’s a small detail, but a telling one — the kind of online radicalization that tech leaders used to discuss as a hypothetical now arriving on their own doorsteps.

The paper itself, titled “Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age,” reads like an unusual document for a company of OpenAI’s stature. Its proposals — taxing capital gains harder, taxing robots, giving every American a dividend from AI-generated growth — feel more like something Bernie Sanders might pitch on a Sunday show than a Silicon Valley boardroom memo. Axios picked up on this, noting much of it reads “distinctly Sanders-coded.” Whether that’s a genuine ideological shift or strategic positioning, no one quite knows yet.

Lucia Velasco, a senior economist at the Inter-American Development Bank, captured the central tension well. OpenAI, she pointed out, is “the most interested party in how this conversation turns out.” The company proposing the rules is also the company those rules are meant to constrain. She didn’t dismiss the document — she actually praised governments for being too slow — but warned that the conversation shouldn’t end with the company that started it. That feels right. It’s possible to take a document seriously and still be wary of who wrote it.

The numbers around public sentiment don’t help OpenAI’s case. A recent Quinnipiac poll found 80% of Americans worried about AI, 55% saying it does more harm than good, and 70% expecting it to shrink job opportunities. These aren’t fringe numbers. They suggest a population that has already made up its mind about the costs, even as the benefits remain abstract and unevenly distributed.

What’s hard not to notice is the gap between the document’s ambition and the company’s incentives. A four-day workweek and a robot tax sound like solutions for a society that’s already lost — already automated, already restructured, already past the point where workers have leverage. There’s a sense that OpenAI is writing the post-mortem before the body has finished cooling. Whether that’s foresight or fatalism depends on how much faith you put in the people holding the pen.