Andrew Yang said the United States is taxing the wrong things as artificial intelligence begins to reshape the labor market.
“We tend to tax things that we want to discourage, things that we don’t want to reduce very much,” the Progressive Party founder and former presidential candidate said in an interview on CNBC’s Squawk Box on Wednesday.
As AI systems replace human jobs, “we should actually try to stop taxing labor,” he said.
In fact, Yang believes that companies that benefit most from automation should bear a larger tax burden.
He pointed to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s warning last year that up to 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs could be automated by AI within the next five years, and Amodei’s suggestion that AI companies themselves be taxed.
“Since when do CEOs of large companies raise their hands and say, ‘Hey, tax me and me?'” Yang added that tech leaders “see the writing on the wall” and understand there could be a backlash.
AI inflection point
Yang’s call comes as a growing number of technology companies have announced tens of thousands of layoffs over the past two years, with many executives talking about AI-powered restructuring.
The latest AI-related job cuts include Atlassian’s 1,600 job cuts this week in what the company’s CEO described as a broader effort to reposition the business for the “AI era.”
For Yang, these moves are just the beginning.
“I just came from an AI conference in the West, oh my goodness,” he said. When it comes to AI development, he said, “They told me that what we’re going to see in the next six months is going to exceed what we’ve seen in the last 10 years.”
He described a company that sells autonomous coding tools to large enterprises and said its revenue “has grown 100 times in the last 12 months.”
If this pace continues, AI will begin to consume technology budgets that once funded human engineers, Yang said.
A widespread transition will not be smooth, Yang said, adding: “There is no chance that this transition will not be difficult for millions of people.”
Human labor tax discussion
Yang is not alone in pushing for tax reform.
Billionaire venture capitalist Vinod Khosla said in an XPost last month that if AI eliminates millions of jobs, it might make sense to eliminate income taxes for most Americans and target capital instead.
Meanwhile, Sen. Bernie Sanders, ranking member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, released a report last October calling for a “robot tax” on companies that use AI to replace jobs.
“The implicit American social contract is breaking down,” Yang told CNBC.
