Karin Prien, deputy leader of the Christian Democrats and Germany's federal family minister, told Stern that value creation which runs mainly through AI must be taxed too: "anders geht es nicht" — there is no other way. Her framing is generational. It has to be discussed, she said, what artificial intelligence and the transformation of work mean for young people and their careers.
She is not the first in her own party. Digital minister Karsten Wildberger argued in Tagesspiegel for taxing the "extremely high revenue" generated with the technology, using the proceeds to fund the transition. He then softened it on RTL/ntv: "Let's let the growth come first."
Economy minister Katherina Reiche put the opposite case at an event held by Die Welt: "Let's introduce AI first, before we tax it." Chancellor and party leader Friedrich Merz has been sceptical of an AI tax throughout. The coalition thus has two ministries answering the same question in opposite directions.
The partner is warmer. The SPD parliamentary group's September resolution held that technical progress must not make people poor "because machines take over well-paid tasks and only low-paid work is left for employees", and committed the party to collective bargaining coverage and "fair taxation of profits". Bill Gates has argued for years that robots and AI should be taxed, to reduce the incentive to substitute machines for people.
What exists so far, though, is a debate, not a bill. There are no concrete plans in the coalition — no rate, no base, no mechanism. That is where the difficulty sits: "revenue generated with AI" is not a line in a set of accounts. A company using AI in marketing, manufacturing and customer service does not earn a separable share of its revenue "with AI". Any definition would either capture nearly everything or only the advertising budgets of vendors who apply the label themselves.
The timing is awkward. Germany is simultaneously trying to position itself as the location for the very data centres and labs whose returns would be taxed, while the same question is being argued elsewhere. Prien's intervention is therefore less a draft law than a marker: the party running the country no longer treats the taxation of AI revenue as a footnote.
