Opinion

REP RO KHANNA: We need a new tech social contract to reclaim AI from billionaires

We live in a new gilded age. Tech billionaires, believing they would have been heroic conquerors in a different era, are wresting control of our economy, our media, and our politics

By Rep. Ro Khanna Fox News

Published February 26, 2026 9:00am EST

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On February 20th, I was at Stanford University with Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. to speak to over 1,600 students about the defining issues of our time: inequality and AI. We had the largest turnout since President Barack Obama visited the campus in 2015. I laid out my vision for a new tech social contract and seven seminal principles for a more democratic AI. Here is the essence of what I had to say.

We live in a new gilded age. Tech billionaires, believing they would have been heroic conquerors in a different era, are wresting control of our economy, our media, and our politics.

Most Americans feel they have little say in shaping their own future or that of their kids. This has contributed to anger, resentment, and a hopeless cynicism in places across our nation.

A nation cannot survive with islands of prosperity and seas of despair.

Professor Gabriel Zucman has shown that today’s wealth concentration is at the highest it has been in our nation’s history. About 19 billionaires have 3.4 trillion — the equivalent of 12.5 percent of all the goods and services that are produced in the U.S. in a year. This is nearly three times more than the wealthiest Americans were worth relative to the size of the economy at the peak of the Gilded Age. 

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., speaks next to Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., at a town hall event on February 20, 2026, in Stanford, California.  (Benjamin Fanjoy/Getty Images)

Extreme wealth forms an unholy alliance with power leading to two tiers of justice and stripping ordinary citizens of an equal voice in our democratic experiment.

We see the future from here. We know what is coming in a way most politicians and D.C. bureaucrats simply can't see. And the question we need to ask ourselves is this: What kind of future are we going to build? Will this future be only for the tech lords or for all of us?

We convened this town hall at the epicenter of this wealth concentration and AI innovation. The 50-mile radius around my district which includes Stanford, Apple, Google, Nvidia, Broadcom, and Tesla is worth over $18 trillion. Their market capitalization is nearly 1/3 of the entire US stock market. One-third of our nation’s wealth originates here and in the one surrounding Congressional district.

Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., sits at a town hall event on February 20, 2026 in Stanford, California. The town hall's theme was "Who Controls the Future of........

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