---
title: "Bill Gates Says Robots That Take Human Jobs Should Pay the Same Payroll Taxes"
description: "He told Ezra Klein the levy would keep money flowing to Social Security and Medicare as AI displaces office workers."
author: "rews desk"
published: 2026-09-30T17:23:16Z
modified: 2026-09-30T22:38:57Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/bill-gates-says-robots-that-take-human-jobs-should-pay-the-s-5e16bf
language: en
tags: ["ai", "automation", "taxation", "labor", "gates", "business"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# Bill Gates Says Robots That Take Human Jobs Should Pay the Same Payroll Taxes

*He told Ezra Klein the levy would keep money flowing to Social Security and Medicare as AI displaces office workers.*

By rews desk · September 30, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/bill-gates-says-robots-that-take-human-jobs-should-pay-the-s-5e16bf

## In brief

- Bill Gates said firms replacing human workers with robots should pay the same FICA payroll taxes
- He made the case in an interview with Ezra Klein of The New York Times that aired Tuesday
- In an August essay, Gates said taxing AI tokens could fund retraining and a stronger safety net
- Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and OpenAI have floated similar tax ideas tied to automation
- Gates first proposed a robot tax in 2017 and says he remains “a big proponent”

Bill Gates said that companies replacing human workers with robots should owe the same payroll taxes those workers would have paid, laying out the idea in an interview with Ezra Klein of The New York Times that aired on Tuesday.

“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,” Mr. Gates said. “Society gets to decide” how to support workers even when AI is pushing them out, he added.

Under FICA, workers pay a share of each paycheck toward Social Security and Medicare, and employers match it. A robot tax, Mr. Gates said, would keep both a safety net for citizens and tax revenue for the government intact as automation spreads.

“Just because the economic signals say that it’d be lower cost to use an AI doesn’t mean society has to do that,” he said.

Mr. Gates, who co-founded Microsoft in 1975, has warned before that AI and robotics stand to wipe out white-collar jobs. In a nearly 6,000-word essay published in August, he wrote that office jobs were already taking a “modestly” sized hit and speculated that blue-collar work would be next. Physical robots trail AI systems in development, he said, but people underestimate how quickly humanoid machines will close the gap.

In the same essay, he argued that taxing AI tokens “would slow the rush away from human labor a little and raise money for retraining and a stronger safety net.”

Mr. Gates is not the only figure in the industry calling for a new approach. Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, has backed stronger tax policies, possibly aimed at AI companies, to spread the technology’s gains more widely. OpenAI has proposed taxes tied to automated labor as part of a broader plan to answer AI-driven disruption.

Mr. Gates first floated a robot tax in 2017, in an interview with Kevin Delaney, then the chief executive of Quartz. Nearly a decade on, the idea hasn’t left him. “I’m still a big proponent of it,” he wrote in the essay. “Although it is not the whole solution to the threat of AI, it is part of a wise response.”