Sam Altman is sketching out a future economy shaped less by paychecks and more by ownership, as artificial intelligence begins to absorb a growing share of productive work.
In an interview earlier this year with comedian and podcaster Theo Von, the OpenAI chief pointed out that simply distributing cash in an AI-driven world would fail to give people a meaningful stake in what comes next, as the technology increasingly generates wealth on humanity’s behalf.
Altman said that in the future, the problem will be one of participation and governance, rather than material security alone.
“I think people really need agency. They really need to feel like they have a voice in governing the future and deciding where things go. And I think if you just say, ‘Okay, AI is going to do everything, and then everybody gets like a dividend from that,’ it’s not going to feel right. And I don’t think it actually would be good for people.”
While others have floated the idea of a universal basic income, Altman said he prefers that the people participate and share in the wealth produced by AI and robotics.
“I don’t just want like a check every month. What I would want is an ownership share in whatever the AI creates so that I feel like I’m participating in this thing that’s going to compound and get more valuable over time. So I sort of like universal basic wealth better than universal basic income.”
To illustrate what that ownership might look like, Altman introduced a hypothetical global framework, emphasizing that the figures were intentionally exaggerated to convey the concept rather than a concrete plan.
“A crazy idea, but in the spirit of crazy ideas… There are roughly 8 billion people in the world. If the world can generate 20 quintillion tokens per year, just making up a huge number here, 12 of those go to the normal capitalistic system. But eight quintillion tokens are going to get divided up equally among eight billion people. So everybody gets one trillion tokens. And that’s your kind of, universal basic wealth globally.”
Tokens are tiny units of data that AI models process for prediction, generation and reasoning.
Altman said the defining feature of such a system would be flexibility and ownership, rather than passive receipt of income.
“And people can sell those tokens. If I don’t need mine, I can sell them to you. We could pool ours together for a new art project we want to do. But instead of just getting a check, everybody on earth is getting like a slice of the world’s AI capacity.”
Recently, Elon Musk said that AI and robotics would give birth to a universal high income, delivering wealth and abundance to all. But the SpaceX CEO fell short of explaining its impact on society. Altman seems to be the first to present a feasible idea on how AI-produced wealth would be distributed to the people.
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