Bill Gates renews push for a robot tax: machines should pay payroll taxes too
Bill Gates has renewed his push for a robot tax, arguing that companies replacing human workers with AI and robots should pay the same payroll taxes those workers once carried. Speaking on the New York Times podcast "The Ezra Klein Show" on September 30, Gates framed it as a matter of basic fairness in the tax code.
"You define a unit of labor and say, independent of whether that's delivered by a human or robot, you are paying the same FICA tax that a human worker would pay," Gates said, according to Business Insider. FICA — the Federal Insurance Contributions Act tax — funds Social Security and Medicare, and today its burden is split between employers and workers. Replace the worker with software, and the contribution vanishes.
Gates first floated the idea in 2017 and returned to it in an August essay on Gates Notes: hire a person and you pay payroll taxes; buy a robot and you can usually write it off as a business expense. "The tax system nudges you toward replacing people with machines," he wrote. A tax on AI tokens or physical robots, he argues, would slow the rush away from human labor and raise money for retraining and a stronger safety net.
The interview went further. Gates called the idea of AI self-regulation — championed by the Trump administration — "really insane," comparing it to having no FDA for medicines or no aviation safety agency. He warned that blue-collar jobs would "soon" face disruption too, and said people underestimate how fast humanoid robots are catching up.
Whether a robot tax ever becomes law, the proposal reframes the automation debate: not whether machines take jobs, but who pays for the transition.