In a New York Times interview, he said a unit of labor should face the same FICA tax whether it is provided by a person or a robot. Gates says the approach could help sustain social programs and fund support for workers.
Bill Gates has again argued that work performed by robots and artificial-intelligence systems should be taxed. In an interview last week with The New York Times’ Ezra Klein, the Microsoft co-founder said society can decide how to support workers displaced by automation.
Gates proposed measuring work in comparable units and applying the same payroll tax regardless of whether a person or a robot performs it. He was referring to the US Federal Insurance Contributions Act (FICA), which helps fund programs including Social Security and Medicare. Employees pay part of their earnings, and employers contribute a matching amount.
In Gates’ view, this could help preserve social protections and tax revenue as automation spreads. He has also suggested taxing AI tokens—the units of computing used by language models—as a way to slow the shift away from human labor and raise money for retraining. The proposal is a policy idea, not a current tax rule.
Gates first called for a robot tax in 2017. In an essay published in August, he wrote that AI was already having a modest effect on office work and could later affect blue-collar jobs, while physical robots were developing more slowly than software systems. Other industry figures have also raised tax proposals: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has called for stronger tax policy to spread AI’s gains, while OpenAI has proposed taxes tied to automated labor.