Artificial intelligence promises unprecedented prosperity. But that prosperity is becoming concentrated in remarkably few hands. A new generation of robber barons has emerged, prompting warnings of techno-feudalism: an economy in which a handful of firms own the digital infrastructure on which everyone else depends.

A defining political question of the AI age is, therefore, not whether wealth will be created, but who will own it.

The history of liberalism is, in many ways, the history of widening ownership. Nineteenth-century liberals challenged the concentration of land ownership because they understood that whoever owned the dominant asset of the age exercised disproportionate economic and political power. Today, the defining assets are no longer simply land and factories, but increasingly the intangible capital of the digital age: data, algorithms, computing power and artificial intelligence. Liberalism should respond to the AI revolution as it always has – not by resisting wealth creation, but by widening ownership.

The Liberal Democrats should answer that challenge by championing a Citizens’ Ownership Fund.

The inspiration comes from Alaska. For more than forty years, the Alaska Permanent Fund has invested part of the state’s oil wealth on behalf of every resident, paying an annual dividend while preserving the capital for future generations.

Britain should apply the same principle to the AI economy. A Citizens’ Ownership Fund would build a portfolio of shares in frontier AI and technology companies. Those investments would generate dividends paid equally to every citizen while the underlying assets remained invested. Instead of merely taxing AI after wealth has been created, Britain would own a permanent stake in creating it.

For too long governments have assumed that the public benefits from successful companies only through taxation. Liberals should think differently. Where public investment helps create extraordinary private wealth, society should sometimes receive equity rather than tax. Ownership is a better dividend than redistribution.

AI has not emerged from nowhere. It rests on decades of taxpayer-funded scientific research, world-class universities, publicly educated talent, national infrastructure and the rule of law. Where companies benefit from those public foundations, they should make a modest equity contribution to the Citizens’ Ownership Fund. This could be linked to access to national computing infrastructure or, for the largest frontier AI firms, as part of the regulatory framework governing their operation in the UK. Instead of asking society to settle only for tax receipts once wealth has been created, Britain would acquire a permanent ownership stake in the industries that public investment helped create.

Freedom is more than the absence of interference; it also means not being subject to another’s arbitrary power. Ownership provides independence. A citizen with a stake in productive capital is less dependent on employers, markets or the state alone. The dividend from a Citizens’ Ownership Fund would not make anyone wealthy, but it would give every citizen an independent stake in the nation’s prosperity. By dispersing ownership, we also disperse power.

This is not nationalisation. Companies would remain privately owned, independently managed and free to innovate. Entrepreneurs and investors would continue to prosper. However, instead of relying solely on taxing success after the event, the British people would share directly in that success through ownership.

The fund, not individual citizens, would own the shares permanently. Citizens would receive equal annual dividends, while the capital remained invested for future generations. Ownership could not gradually be bought back by the wealthy.

If AI shifts an ever greater share of national income from labour to capital, then broadening ownership of capital becomes the defining liberal challenge of the twenty-first century. As well as asking how we should regulate AI, liberals should ask who owns the wealth it creates. The answer should not be a handful of AI oligarchs. It should be every citizen.

* Daniel Duggan is a Liberal Democrat Councillor in Gateshead