U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders has introduced the 'AI Wealth Fund Act,' which proposes a one-time 50% equity tax on large AI companies with annual revenues exceeding $200 million. The plan aims to create a $7 trillion sovereign wealth fund to provide dividends to citizens in the form of a universal basic income. The bill is primarily targeting centralized big tech firms like OpenAI and xAI.

While the passage of the bill remains uncertain, the Web3 industry and market participants are viewing it as a new narrative opportunity. The observation is that if regulatory and tax costs for establishing and investing in centralized AI firms in the U.S. continue to rise, capital and development momentum may shift toward the regulation-resistant Decentralized AI ecosystem.

In particular, there is speculation that VCs and development teams looking to avoid equity taxation and corporate regulatory pressure may turn toward open-source-based distributed computing and data networks like Bittensor (TAO) or Render (RNDR). The logic is that protocol economies operating outside the legal boundaries of any specific nation could act as a form of shelter.

The rapid response of the on-chain market was also notable. On the Solana network, a meme coin named 'American AI Fund (AAIF),' inspired by the bill, was launched and attracted speculative capital. It is an interesting example of how quickly macro policy shifts can be turned into financial products (tokenized) on-chain.

Of course, there are infrastructural limitations to decentralized AI fully replacing centralized AI as an alternative, and the possibility that regulators might eventually put the brakes on blockchain-based compute resource trading cannot be ruled out. Therefore, rather than viewing this tax discussion as an unconditional boon for Web3, it should be observed as one of many long-term milestones where the axis of technological trends may shift.