Maybe Frank Kloucek and his fellow South Dakota Democrats can’t stop artificial intelligence and data centers. But they could sure tax the crap out of SkyNet!
The Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator offers this policy brief listing 34 ways to tax AI to pay for all the externalities—job loss, environmental harms, loss of privacy, consolidation of power, usurpation of free will—it imposes on society:
This paper doesn’t say we should implement any or all of these taxes; it just lays out these options and invites policymakers (and in a democracy, especially on Election Day, that’s all of us!) to decide which triggers we want to pull.
Notice #25: AI personhood!
An AI system would be assigned legal personhood and taxed on its own income instead of having that income attributed to its owners. Variants include putting each AI system in a separate corporate shell with a tax rate tied to assessed harms and assigning personhood only where AI systems control economic resources in ways too opaque to attribute to their owners. Several states have enacted laws to prohibit providing legal personhood to AI systems, and more are considering doing so, often to clarify human or corporate responsibility for actions of AI systems [Ramzanali, Oct 2026, p. 25].
Ramzalani footnotes that AI-personhood paragraph with multiple sources:
- Michael J. Ahn, Navigating the Future of Work: A Case for a Robot Tax in the Age of AI, Brookings Inst. (May 13, 2024).
- Xavier Oberson, Taxing Artificial Intelligence, 217, 219 (2024) (proposing a second-stage AI tax including a tax based on AI personhood).
- Reuven Avi-Yonah et al., Boden Lecture: Taxation of Autonomous Artificial Intelligence, 108 MARQ. L. REV. 1081 (2025).
- David Elkins & Mirit Eyal, Toward AI Tax Personhood (Nov. 4, 2025) (preprint).
- Idaho Code § 5-346 (2022); N.D. Cent. Code § 1-01-49(17) (2023); Tenn. Code Ann. § 1-3- 105(a)(20)(B) (2026); Utah Code Ann. § 63G-32-102(1) (2024).
- Martin Kaste, “Several States Considering Ban on Legal Personhood for AI,” NPR (May 11, 2026).
- Aaron Mak, “The Case Against AI Personhood,” Politico (May 27, 2026).
I’ll just note our revolutionary founding motto, as I’m sure will any large-language-model bot receiving a tax notice: No Taxation Without Representation! Next thing you know, we’ll see Wall-E and R. Daneel Olivaw duking it out for a seat in the U.S. House.
But hey, we tax tobacco and booze because they are bad for us; we should treat artificial intelligence the same way. Keep this list of AI taxes handy for the 20267 Legislative Session!