Bill Gates Says Robots Should Pay FICA Taxes when They Replace Human Workers
Gates says an equivalent payroll tax on automated work could slow the shift from human labor and fund retraining and safety net programs.
- On Tuesday, Bill Gates reiterated his proposal to tax robots replacing human workers in an interview with Ezra Klein of The New York Times, saying "society gets to decide" how to support displaced employees.
- Nearly 10 years after first proposing the idea in 2017, Gates argues the current tax system unfairly nudges companies toward automation because robot purchases are deductible business expenses while hiring humans incurs payroll taxes.
- Gates suggests defining a "unit of labour" so that work performed by machines is taxed at the same 7.65% FICA rate as human employees, with revenues funding Social Security and Medicare.
- Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI have proposed similar tax policies to distribute AI's economic gains more broadly and address AI-driven labor disruption, showing alignment across the technology industry.
- In a nearly 6,000-word essay published in August, Gates warned that office jobs are being hit "modestly" by automation, with blue-collar roles soon to follow as humanoid robots advance in development.
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The entrepreneur proposes that automated work contribute to funding pensions and advocates raising funds to help those who lose income by replacing people
Bill Gates wants a government list of who gets to keep their job. Don't let him
Bill Gates has spent the past year warning that this wave of automation is different — that artificial intelligence replaces human thinking itself, faster than any previous technology gave workers time to adjust. On Aug. 26, 2026, he laid out his answer in a nearly 6,000-word essay on Gates Notes, in two parts: tax AI […]
Microsoft founder Bill Gates believes that due to the rapid development of artificial intelligence, governments will likely have to limit the replacement of humans by machines in certain areas in the future and reform the tax system.
The co-founder of Microsoft argues that the work carried out by robots should be subject to the same tax that affects human work, an idea that launched in 2017 and that has now come back to propose, in order to guarantee revenues to the state and protection to workers affected by automation. Bill Gates once again defends that [...]
Bill Gates Renews Push for Robot Taxes as AI Job Losses Loom Larger
Bill Gates urges applying FICA taxes to robot and AI labor to counter the current code's bias toward automation. He pairs the idea with human-reserved jobs in care and education. Recent Democratic proposals and industry pushback show the debate is intensifying as job displacement risks grow.
Bill Gates has a plan to ensure that people keep getting paid in an AI-driven job apocalypse: Tax the robots. In an interview with The New York Times that aired Tuesday, the billionaire philanthropist said that “society decides” how to support its workers — even if AI is pushing them out. “You define a unit of work and say, whether it’s provided by a human or a robot, you’re paying the same FICA tax that a human worker would pay,” Gates said, re…
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