Bill Gates renews call for robot tax, says AI doing human jobs should face the same payroll tax

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has again argued that robots or AI systems replacing human workers should be taxed in the same way as people doing the same work. In an interview aired on Sept. 30 on the Ezra Klein Podcast, Gates said policymakers should define a "unit of labor" and apply the same Federal Insurance Contributions Act, or FICA, tax whether the task is carried out by a person or a machine. He said the idea would help preserve tax revenue while also supporting economic security for citizens affected by job displacement. The article explains that FICA is the U.S. payroll tax used to fund Social Security and Medicare, with both employees and employers contributing. Gates’ latest remarks build on a proposal he raised as early as 2016, though this time he outlined a more specific framework centered on labor units rather than taxing a robot as an object. The report also notes that on the same day Gates made the remarks, Republican members of the U.S. Senate formally introduced a cryptocurrency tax bill, placing AI taxation and crypto taxation side by side in the U.S. policy discussion for the second half of 2026.