Bernie Sanders bill would tax some AI activity

A Senate tax proposal in Washington would aim at the AI work lawmakers decide is important enough to sit inside the tax code. Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent, introduced the bill on June 18, 2026.

The measure would amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to impose an excise tax on systemically important AI activity. An excise tax is a tax on a specific activity or transaction, not a company’s overall profit. For AI developers and the companies that buy their tools, that could mean a new cost line attached to the most consequential systems they build or use.

The label that sets the reach

The phrase “systemically important” is doing the heavy lifting in Sanders’ bill. The proposal does not say every chatbot, image generator or software tool would be treated the same way. Instead, it points at the activity judged important enough to matter across the system.

That distinction matters because the narrower the definition, the more likely the tax hits a small group of large operators. A broader reading would make it easier for the cost to ripple through vendors and business customers that rely on advanced AI.

Who ends up paying

Taxes on business activity rarely stop at the first payer. If the measure became law, companies could try to fold the cost into software contracts, product prices or investment plans.

That is why the definition matters as much as the tax itself. The bill is narrow in form, but it points at a fast-growing technology that already shapes how businesses build products, answer customers and handle routine work.

How much the tax would matter in practice will depend on what counts as systemically important, because that is where the bill draws its line between ordinary AI use and the activity it means to target.