SAN FRANCISCO, July 14 — A new Pew Research Center poll, released in October 2023, found that 54% of Americans support a policy that would target the profits of major artificial intelligence companies. The survey injected a pointed fiscal question into a debate that has, until now, largely centered on the technology’s capabilities and risks. The poll’s finding lands as the AI industry’s leading firms have posted staggering growth.
OpenAI, the research organization that launched ChatGPT on November 30, 2022, had already reached 100 million users by January 2023. That same month, the company was valued at $29 billion, following a $10 billion investment from Microsoft.
The rapid adoption of the chatbot turned a niche research project into a global phenomenon and a major economic force. According to the record, OpenAI was founded in December 2015 by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and others. The company’s trajectory from a nonprofit research lab to a commercial powerhouse has been one of the defining business stories of the decade.
The $10 billion Microsoft investment, finalized in early 2023, cemented the partnership and gave OpenAI the capital to scale its computing infrastructure. Google, through its DeepMind division — acquired in 2014 for $500 million — has been a foundational player in the AI race.
DeepMind developed AlphaGo in 2016, a program that defeated a world champion at the ancient board game Go. Google later launched its Bard chatbot in March 2023, entering the consumer AI market directly. Meta, founded in 2004, released its LLaMA language model in February 2023, adding another major competitor to the field.
The policy question
The Pew poll, conducted in October 2023, did not specify a mechanism for how such a profit-targeting policy would work. But the survey’s finding — that a majority of Americans favor it — signals a public appetite for redistributing some of the wealth generated by AI. The companies named in the poll’s framing — OpenAI, Google, and Meta — are central to this debate.
Their profits, the survey suggests, could be subject to a new tax or revenue-sharing arrangement. The timeline of the industry’s growth is compressed.
OpenAI was founded in December 2015. Within seven years, it had launched a product that reached 100 million users in roughly two months. The speed of adoption has no clear historical parallel.
By comparison, the internet itself took years to reach that scale. The $29 billion valuation, recorded in January 2023, reflected investor confidence that OpenAI would capture a significant share of the emerging AI market.
Google’s DeepMind acquisition, completed in 2014 for $500 million, now looks like a prescient bet. The division’s AlphaGo achievement in 2016 demonstrated that machines could master complex, intuitive tasks previously thought to be the exclusive domain of human intelligence. Google’s Bard launch in March 2023 was a direct response to ChatGPT’s success, marking the beginning of the consumer AI wars.
Meta’s entry into the large-language-model space with LLaMA in February 2023 added another dimension. Unlike OpenAI’s proprietary model, Meta released LLaMA under a research license, making it available to academics and researchers. This open approach has fueled a parallel ecosystem of AI development outside the major corporate labs.
What to watch
The Pew poll provides a snapshot of public opinion from October 2023. Whether that 54% support has held, grown, or diminished by mid-2026 is not known from the available data. But the survey established a baseline: a majority of Americans, at least at that moment, favored a policy that would redirect some of the profits from the AI industry.
The companies themselves have not uniformly addressed the question. OpenAI’s leadership, including Sam Altman, has spoken publicly about the need for broad-based wealth distribution from AI, though the organization has not endorsed a specific tax or profit-sharing plan.
Google and Meta have not commented on the Pew finding. For now, the debate remains at the level of principle. The poll shows the public is ahead of the policy.
The question is whether lawmakers will catch up.
Sources
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