An overwhelming majority of US employees support the establishment of an artificial intelligence (AI) sovereign wealth fund, reflecting deep skepticism toward AI firms, according to a survey.
The survey conducted by Verasight, a non partisan research firm, also indicates the public demand for strict federal oversight of AI firms as tech layoffs amid higher corporate profits create dissatisfaction, CNBC reported.
The June 2026 survey by Verasight revealed that 69% of US respondents support norms suggesting AI firms to transfer an overwhelming 50% of their stock to a public fund.
The Verasight survey also revealed that 49% of the respondents think the government should be the final decision maker over AI companies on safety.
An overwhelming 81% of those surveyed said the government should have the authority to block the release of a risky AI system.
The survey comes after a two-week stand-off between Anthropic and the US administration following a directive to end access to its artificial intelligence models to foreigners.
In June, the US had directed Anthropic to block foreigners from accessing its new artificial intelligence models The company which owns the Claude chatbot, said the development has forced it to end shut down its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models.
A US administration official had said the Commerce Department’s action followed another company’s claim it was able to jailbreak Mythos. This raised alarm in the Trump administration about potential national security risks.
The Verasight survey also indicated that 30% of the respondents trust the US administration more than Anthropic to decide whether a model is safe or not.
In another significant finding reflecting the mood of the respondents on the proposed regulations governing AI, 43% said these norms are tailored to benefit the companies and not the public.
And another brute majority, 89%, support a policy dictating that the AI firms should make public disclosures about the findings of safety testing of their models.
Interestingly, 46% of the 1,690 respondents surveyed said they used Google’s Gemini in the last 30 days while 45% indicated they dabbled with ChatGPT. The survey was conducted between June 18 and June 19.
Interestingly, 90%of the respondents had heard of OpenAI’s ChatGPT model while 83% vouched for Gemini. MetaAI’s Llama (67%) and Microsoft’s Copilot (66%) ranked higher in this aspect than Anthropic’s Claude and Elon Musk-backed xAI’s Grok, both known by 51% of the respondents.
Senator Bernie Sanders had in June proposed the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, envisaging a 50% stake for the public in the largest AI companies in the US.
Sanders had said the Act was aimed at guaranteeing that the economic benefits of AI are used to improve the lives of the public, “not simply to make the richest people in the world even richer.”
The findings also come after a report by Goldman Sachs predicting an AI job apocalypse. The report estimates that 9% of the labor workforce, accounting for nearly 15 million workers, may lose jobs during what it described as an AI transition period.
US layoffs surged to their highest May level since the pandemic in 2020, with employers announcing more than 97,000 job cuts across the country last month and citing artificial intelligence as a key factor in roughly 40% of those decisions, according to data released by Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
Employers have attributed 87,714 job cuts to AI in the first five months of 2026 alone, already surpassing the 54,836 recorded for the entirety of 2025. That pace suggests not just a trend but an acceleration.å
