“The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government.” — Thomas Jefferson
Editor’s Note
The People’s Commission on Technology and the American Future was founded on a single conviction: that the AI transformation of work, community, and democratic life is too consequential to be governed without the people’s voice at the table.
That conviction has produced a body of work — a Civic Curriculum, twenty-two Citizen Briefs, an Accountability Scorecard, a founding Charter — organized around the question of what citizens must understand, and what institutions they must build, to ensure that artificial intelligence serves human flourishing rather than displacing it.
The American Humanity Trust is the Commission’s answer to the hardest version of that question.
Understanding what is needed is one thing. Building the institutional architecture to deliver it is another. The Trust is that architecture — a framework for ensuring that the unprecedented wealth now being generated by AI, built on public science and public data and the labor of millions of citizens who will bear the costs of its deployment, is directed toward the public institutions that a new social contract actually requires.
The timing is not incidental. The largest AI companies in the world are preparing public offerings that will generate, within the next eighteen months, a wave of private wealth unlike anything the American economy has produced since the Gilded Age. The decisions about whether any of that wealth carries public obligations — and what those obligations look like in practice — are being made right now, in legislative chambers, in regulatory offices, in courtrooms, and in the civic forums where organized citizens can still shape what is possible.
The Trust speaks to all of those places at once. It is a legislative proposal for a public benefit charge on AI IPO proceeds. It is a governance framework for ensuring that AI foundations serve humanity rather than their donors. It is a policy design for the worker transition infrastructure, the First 1,000 Days investments, the democratic institutions, and the salutogenic foundations of community life that a social contract adequate to this moment must include.
And it is, above all, an expression of the People’s Commission’s founding proposition: that the care of human life and happiness — in Aaron Antonovsky’s terms, the restoration of comprehensibility, manageability, and meaningfulness for the workers and families and communities AI is transforming — is the first and only legitimate measure of whether this technology is actually benefiting humanity.
The American Humanity Trust. Toward a Social Contract for the AI Age.
We offer this framework as a working document, in the spirit of the Commission itself: open to scrutiny, built for improvement, and accountable to the citizens whose flourishing it exists to serve.
— Shimon Waldfogel M.D. Publisher of Moonshot Press and President fo The Institute For Salutogenesis
The American Humanity Trust: Toward a Social Contract for the AI Age
What It Is
The American Humanity Trust is a framework — both institutional and policy — for ensuring that a meaningful share of the wealth generated by artificial intelligence is directed to the public from which it emerged and to whom its consequences fall hardest.
It is grounded in a single proposition: the science, the public infrastructure, the data, the legal protections, the educational systems, and the consumer base that made the current AI economy possible were funded, built, and sustained by the American public. The wealth those investments are now generating is unprecedented in scale. The mechanisms for translating it into broadly shared benefit do not yet exist.
The Humanity Trust is the proposal for those mechanisms.
Why It Matters Now
The next eighteen months will see what is likely to be the largest concentration of new private wealth in American history. OpenAI is preparing for a public offering at a valuation that could exceed one trillion dollars. Anthropic, xAI, and the foundational AI infrastructure companies — chipmakers, cloud providers, model developers — are positioned for IPOs or secondary transactions that will generate hundreds of billions of dollars for a relatively small group of founders, early employees, and investors.
This wealth is not problematic in itself. Wealth creation is what entrepreneurship is supposed to produce.
What is problematic is that the public — whose taxpayer-funded research seeded these companies, whose data trained their models, whose legal protections enabled their growth, and whose displaced workers will bear the costs of their deployment — has no structural mechanism to receive any share of the returns.
The window to design that mechanism is open now. After the IPOs close and the wealth is privately distributed, it closes.
What It Would Do
The American Humanity Trust would fund four categories of work that no existing institution is adequately resourcing:
Worker transition and economic resilience. Wage insurance, portable benefits, automatic safety-net stabilizers, retraining at the scale of the GI Bill — the infrastructure that converts displacement into dignified transition rather than catastrophe.
The democratic infrastructure of the AI age. Independent journalism, civic education, public-interest AI tools, deliberative civic institutions including the People’s Commission and bodies like it across the country.
Human development across the lifespan. First 1,000 Days investments that build the capabilities the AI economy of 2043 will reward. Education that prepares citizens to direct AI rather than be directed by it. Care economy investment that recognizes the work AI cannot perform as the foundation it is.
The salutogenic foundations of community life. The local institutions — libraries, community centers, faith communities, public spaces, civic associations — that produce the comprehensibility, manageability, and meaningfulness that no income transfer alone can provide.
How It Would Be Funded
The Trust is designed to be funded through three complementary mechanisms, any one of which could capitalize it at meaningful scale:
A public benefit charge on AI IPO and major secondary transactions. A modest percentage — five to ten percent — of the proceeds from major AI company public offerings, directed to the Trust. At trillion-dollar valuations, even five percent represents tens of billions of dollars per IPO.
An automation productivity dividend. A scaled fee on enterprise AI deployment, calibrated to the productivity gains documented in firms’ own filings, directed to the Trust. This is the mechanism that Acemoglu, Autor, and others have proposed as an automation tax, structured for democratic legitimacy and economic efficiency.
Charitable trust restoration. Where AI companies were founded as charitable trusts or operate under public benefit corporation status, the Trust serves as a vehicle for ensuring that “benefit to humanity” is operationalized rather than merely asserted. This includes the proposal — pending the outcome of Musk v. Altman and similar litigation — that disgorged gains from charitable trust violations be directed to the Trust rather than to the same governance structures that produced the violation.
How It Would Be Governed
The Trust’s governance is the most important question. A poorly governed Trust would simply reproduce the structural failures of the OpenAI Foundation at greater scale.
The Trust must be:
Independent. Governed by a board with no current financial interests in the AI companies whose wealth funds it. Representative. Including workers, parents, educators, civil rights advocates, public health experts, and community leaders alongside technical and economic expertise. Accountable. Subject to annual public reporting against a measurable framework — the Salutogenic Standard — that tests whether its work strengthens or undermines the conditions for human thriving. Geographically distributed. With regional and local mechanisms that reach the communities where AI displacement is most concentrated and where institutional infrastructure is weakest.
The Constitutional Frame
The American Humanity Trust is not a redistribution scheme. It is a property-rights argument. The public funded the foundational science. The public provided the infrastructure. The public is generating the data. The public bears the costs of displacement. The public’s stake in the resulting wealth is not charity received but ownership recognized.
That recognition — built into the design of the AI economy at the moment of its largest wealth events — is what the Humanity Trust exists to secure.
Without it, the AI transition will produce the largest single transfer of public-built value to private hands in modern history. With it, the same transition can produce the broadest distribution of technological benefit since the New Deal.
The choice is being made now.