Andrew Yang says the US is taxing the wrong thing as artificial intelligence begins to reshape the labor market.
“You tend to tax things that you want to discourage, that you want less of,” the Forward Party founder and former presidential candidate said in an interview on CNBC’s Squawk Box on Wednesday.
As AI systems replace human tasks, he said, “we should actually try to stop taxing labor.”
Instead, Yang believes companies benefiting most from automation should shoulder more of the tax burden.
He pointed to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s warning last year that AI could automate up to 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within the next five years — and to Amodei’s suggestion that AI firms themselves should be taxed.
“Since when does the CEO of a major company raise his hand and say, ‘Hey, tax me and mine’?” Yang said, adding that tech leaders “see the writing on the wall” and understand a backlash could be coming.
An AI inflection point
Yang’s call comes as a growing number of tech companies have announced tens of thousands of layoffs over the past two years, with many executives citing AI-driven restructuring.
The latest AI-related layoffs include a 1,600-person job cut at Atlassian this week, due to what its CEO described as a broader effort to reposition the business for the “AI era.”
For Yang, those moves are just the beginning.
“I just came from an AI conference out west, and holy cow,” he said. “They said to me that what we’re going to see in the next six months outstrips what we’ve seen in the last ten years,” in terms of AI development.
He described one company that is selling autonomous coding tools to large enterprises and whose revenue, he said, is “up 100 fold in the last 12 months.”
If that pace continues, Yang said, AI will begin consuming tech budgets that once funded human engineers.
The broader transition, Yang said, will not be smooth: “There is zero chance that this transition is not going to be rough for millions of people.”
The human labor tax debate
Yang is not alone in pushing to rethink the tax system.
In an X post last month, billionaire venture capitalist Vinod Khosla said that if AI eliminates millions of jobs, it might make sense to scrap 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 imposing a “robot tax” on companies that adopt AI to replace jobs.
“The implicit social contract of the American way is being fractured,” Yang told CNBC.
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