A top South Korean official proposed that citizens should share in the profits of the country’s AI chip boom.

Samsung and SK Hynix have seen huge profits and soaring share prices as demand for semiconductors surges. Kim Yong-beom’s suggestion that some of that windfall should be redistributed to support basic income programs for rural communities and startup funding for young people, spooked investors, but AI leaders themselves have suggested similar proposals.

Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and Elon Musk have suggested some sort of universal basic income (or “universal high income,” in some formulations) funded by taxes on AI companies.

Bill Gates, back in 2017, floated a “robot tax” on companies automating workers’ jobs away.