Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed wants the federal government to seize partial ownership and regulatory control of America's top artificial intelligence companies, a position he says goes beyond even Bernie Sanders' own socialist blueprint.
El-Sayed laid out the proposal during a June interview on the left-wing "Head in the Office" podcast, where he endorsed Sanders' call for a 50% government equity stake in leading AI firms and then argued it wasn't enough. He wants "public control" layered on top, a concept he has described as potentially including public representatives on corporate boards or a dedicated government oversight body, Fox News reported.
The proposal matters because El-Sayed is not a fringe protest candidate. He is the Democratic nominee in one of the country's most competitive Senate races, holding a narrow 0.7-percentage-point edge over Republican Mike Rogers in the latest RealClearPolitics polling average. Control of the Senate may hinge on Michigan. And the man Democrats chose to carry their banner there is now openly campaigning on government seizure of a private industry.
Sanders, the independent Vermont senator who caucuses with Democrats, proposed an "American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund" that would impose a one-time 50% equity tax on top technology firms, giving the federal government partial ownership, including voting shares and equal board representation, at companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. He paired that idea with a moratorium on new data center construction and even floated partnering with China on AI development, despite the obvious national security objections.
El-Sayed told the podcast he agrees with all of that but wants to bolt on an enforcement mechanism. As the New York Post reported, he framed AI as an "existential" threat and complained that "there is no regulation":
"I want to actually take it a step further. I agree that we need public ownership, but I also agree that we need some system of public control. What is the point of democracy if it's not to protect us from existential risk? And, right now, there is no regulation."
He elaborated further on the podcast, casting the AI industry as a threat to democratic governance itself:
"Democracy is supposed to fix these problems, and right now, they're trying to slip democracy, and we cannot allow that. And, so, we need leaders who both understand the technological risk and are not bought off by the AI industry itself. It is mission critical right now for our future."
In a separate interview with the Washington Examiner, El-Sayed pointed to federal banking oversight as a model for how the government might regulate AI firms even after acquiring an ownership stake. He argued that ownership alone would not be sufficient without enforcement teeth.
"Imagine what happens if the public owns half the stock, but then we don't actually enforce the safety requirements and something catastrophic happens. That doesn't help you."
He also told the Examiner that no other industry "has the potential to fundamentally change the nature of the social contract, or cause human demise to the level that AI is offering." That is a sweeping claim, and one that conveniently justifies the most aggressive government intervention in a private sector since the New Deal.
El-Sayed's AI stance did not emerge in a vacuum. He won the Democratic primary in a result the Associated Press described as a progressive breakthrough, defeating establishment-backed Rep. Haley Stevens by just 14,893 votes, under one percentage point, out of more than 1.5 million ballots cast. He did it against more than $60 million in outside spending and over the opposition of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, outgoing Sen. Gary Peters, and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer.
Sanders himself endorsed El-Sayed and called his primary win "the most extraordinary victory that I can think of in modern American politics." El-Sayed built a volunteer network of 12,000 people, visited 110 cities, and hosted more than 500 events over 15 months. The infrastructure was impressive. The ideology driving it deserves equal scrutiny.
El-Sayed has a history of saying one thing in front of progressive audiences and another in front of general-election voters. In 2020, audio recordings captured him explicitly endorsing the defunding of police, describing it as "disinvesting in the means of incarcerating someone or killing them on the streets and investing more in the means of educating and empowering and engaging communities." But during the 2026 primary, he told the Detroit News he had "actually never, never called for defunding," Breitbart reported.
His campaign acknowledged his views had "changed" but he refused to give a direct yes-or-no answer on whether he still supported the position. He also deleted multiple social media posts from 2020 that backed the defund movement, including one stating that police departments spend "WAY TOO MUCH" on policing poverty.
That pattern, bold left-wing positioning followed by evasion when the political cost arrives, is worth remembering as El-Sayed now pitches government control of America's most valuable technology sector to a general-election audience in a swing state.
El-Sayed has tried to tie his AI agenda to a real and growing concern: the rapid construction of thousands of data centers across the country to power artificial intelligence. The facilities strain local power grids, consume water, and have generated backlash in communities that were promised economic benefits but got noise and disruption instead.
Both Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and Pennsylvania Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro have recently imposed more stringent restrictions on data center development in response to local complaints. Sanders proposed a full moratorium on new construction. Those are regulatory responses, aggressive ones, in Sanders' case, but they operate within the normal framework of government setting rules for private industry.
El-Sayed's proposal is categorically different. He is not talking about zoning rules or environmental permits. He is talking about the government owning half the equity in private companies and then exercising "democratic control" over their operations. When pressed on what that control would look like, he offered only open-ended questions on the podcast: "What is democratic control over this industry? What does it look like?"
That vagueness is not reassuring. It is the opposite. A Senate candidate campaigning on government seizure of a major industry who cannot describe the mechanism is asking voters for a blank check.
El-Sayed also took a shot at his Republican opponent, quipping to reporters earlier this month that Rogers "wants to put a data center in your backyard so he can make himself feel a little bit more manly by making an AI video." The line got laughs, but it sidestepped the substance. Rogers' position on data centers was not detailed in the exchange. El-Sayed's position, government ownership and control, was.
Sanders' endorsement of El-Sayed was not incidental. The Vermont senator has spent 2026 positioning himself as the leading congressional voice for government intervention in AI, proposing the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act and floating U.S.-China cooperation on artificial intelligence, a suggestion that drew immediate criticism on national security grounds. El-Sayed is the candidate most closely aligned with that agenda, and his willingness to go further makes him a test case for how far left the Democratic Party's economic platform can stretch in a competitive general election.
Rep. Jamie Raskin recently argued that young self-described socialists in the Democratic coalition are not embracing traditional Marxist socialism but rather seeking "greater equality and opportunity." That framing may comfort party strategists. But El-Sayed is not talking about expanding opportunity. He is talking about the federal government taking a 50% ownership stake in private companies and then layering regulatory control on top. There is a word for that, and it is not "opportunity."
Michigan voters will decide in November whether that vision belongs in the United States Senate. The race sits on a razor's edge. El-Sayed's 0.7-point polling lead over Rogers means every policy position he stakes out will face real scrutiny from a general electorate far less progressive than the primary voters who nominated him.
When a candidate tells you he wants the government to own and control private industry, and he cannot explain what that control looks like, believe the ambition and worry about the details later, because he clearly intends to.
