MP Asks Whether AI Agents Should Pay Tax

Independent MP Neil Duncan-Jordan has posed an unusual question to the Treasury: can artificial intelligence be taxed like a worker?

Should your ChatGPT have to cough up 30 percent of its earnings? One MP thinks AI “agents” software that performs tasks once done by humans, should be taxed like workers.

In a written parliamentary question on Oct. 27, Duncan-Jordan, who lost the Labour whip in July after voting against welfare cuts, asked the Chancellor whether she had “considered the potential merits of requiring businesses to pay a tax equivalent to employer National Insurance contributions for each AI agent that performs tasks previously done by people.”

Replying on behalf of the Treasury on Nov. 4, Labour MP Dan Tomlinson said that Employer National Insurance Contributions are levied on earnings, adding: “As AI agents do not receive earnings, it is not clear on what basis employer NICs would be charged.”

Reacting on X, Daily Express political correspondent Christian Calgie said the exchange showed how unprepared the left is for the economic implications of AI.

“The left needs to be really, really worried. They basically haven’t come up with any ideas for decades.”

He said that the “hard left still has an Early-20th-century view, clinging to wealth taxes as if the rich can’t just fly off at the drop of a hat.”

“The soft left hasn’t had a new economic idea since the 90s, or worse, since Wilson,” he said. 
“AI is going to shift the sands so fast that left-wing theory will be as relevant as My Little Pony. They need to get a grip fast,” he added.