In today’s news and commentary, calls for a “token tax” on AI consumption grow and the number of Amazon workers receiving federal aid has tripled between 2020 and 2025.
Concerns over AI’s effects on human jobs continue to grow. For the first time, over 50 percent of young adults (under age 30) say they are more concerned than excited about AI, according to a new survey by Pew Research Center. Echoing these fears, Bill Gates and executives from Bridgewater Associates have both called for a “token tax” to disincentivize replacing human labor with machine labor. An AI token is a small unit of data broken down from a large chunk of information that AI models process and generate. When businesses use enterprise versions of AI systems, they pay for each token. In other words, the price of a token is essentially the “wage paid for machine labor.” Under the current tax system, companies can typically write off the cost of buying a robot, like paying for an AI model, as a business expense, whereas employers must pay payroll taxes on employees. Gates and the Bridgwater executives both argue that the use of AI tokens and robots should be subject to a consumption tax in order to make tax policy stop incentivizing employers to replace human labor with machines. These arguments parallel the AI Tax and Work Protection Act introduced by U.S. Representative Greg Casar (D-TX) earlier this month.
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