alt Hacker NewsDirectly taxing AI is very hard. Imagine if a company had to pay taxes for every AI agent operating in the U.S. or the E.U. As if they were regular employees. Big corporations would simply move the AI agents to countries without taxes.
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refurb • yesterday at 10:32 AM
Not only that, do you tax AI that doesn’t replace humans? How can you tell? Do you tax differently depending on how many workers it replaces? How do you measure that? Do you create exemptions for non-profit or humanitarian use? How do you measure that?
I can only image the Kafkaesque tax code the government would come up with. Then it would create all sorts of weird incentives as companies attempt to minimize tax paid.
tempfile • yesterday at 9:43 AM
Don't people give pretty much exactly this argument about all taxes?
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It's actually trivial. AI apis are pretty streamlined by now. Just slap a tax on processed tokens and you're guaranteed to reach every AI agent out there. It already happens everywhere with sales tax for normal products. Just treat tokens as the product and create an extra tax for it.