...
By Anna Rahmanan
0
Share
Newsweek is a Trust Project member
See more of our trusted coverage when you search.Prefer Newsweek on Googleto see more of our trusted coverage when you search.
Sam Altman has found the one pitch that can make Washington's populists and its plutocrats nod along at the same time: Give the government a piece of OpenAI and let Americans cash the check.
According to the Financial Times, which first reported the discussions, Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has floated handing the U.S. government a 5 percent stake in OpenAI. That's worth roughly $42.6 billion at the company's $852 billion valuation from its March funding round.
He raised the idea in conversations with President Donald Trump, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, according to the FT's sources. The talks are described as conceptual and early-stage, and any deal of this size would likely require an act of Congress.
Read More on Analysis
But the OpenAI stake is really the opening bid in something much larger. Altman wants every major American AI developer, including Google, Meta and Anthropic, among them, to hand over a similar 5 percent slice into a shared vehicle, styled after the Alaska Permanent Fund, which has paid state residents an annual oil dividend since 1982. As of now, none of those companies have agreed—and it's still unclear if any of them will.
What makes this pitch land differently than it might have even a year ago is the audience. This White House has already normalized the idea of the government as shareholder: It converted CHIPS Act grants into a 9.9 percent stake in Intel last August and it extracted a 15 percent cut of China chip sales from Nvidia and AMD in exchange for export licenses. Trump himself has been publicly noodling on the concept since early June, telling reporters aboard Air Force One that AI wealth-sharing "almost becomes a partnership with the American public" and that "it would make 'em rich." Vice President JD Vance has said Trump prefers equity over cash payouts to the public.
Altman, notably, has also been talking to progressive Senator Bernie Sanders. The Vermont politician and two-time presidential hopeful has pushed a far more aggressive version: A one-time 50 percent tax on AI company stock, paid into a sovereign wealth fund, under legislation he's dubbed the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act.
"Since AI is built on the collective knowledge of humanity, the wealth it generates must benefit humanity," Sanders wrote in the New York Times. That a socialist senator and a Republican administration are circling the same basic idea—the public as shareholder in AI—says something about how thoroughly the ground has shifted under this industry.
America First Technology
That exact shift is, perhaps, the bigger story at the moment, one that points to the nationalism and equity that the administration seems to value most. In other words: while likely still trying to get on the president's good side, is OpenAI actually going America first?
Think of it: The company delayed the rollout of its GPT-5.6 model at the government's request just days before the equity story broke, after Lutnick reportedly warned Altman against releasing it without sign-off. OpenAI also faces a sweeping inquiry from a coalition of 42 state attorneys general and is eyeing a future IPO that will need Washington's blessing more than once. A public stake doesn't just generate goodwill but gives regulators a financial reason to want OpenAI to succeed.
It also happens to fit neatly under the America First banner Trump has draped over his AI policy generally: Keep the technology American-made, American-led and, now, American-owned. Framing a slice of the ledger as belonging to "the American people" converts a private company's political liability into a nationalist talking point: AI supremacy over China, but with a dividend check attached. It is hard to imagine a cleaner alignment between Silicon Valley's need for cover and Washington's need for a populist win heading into the midterms, when data center-driven electricity costs and AI-linked job losses are already souring public opinion. A Gallup poll found 71 percent of Americans opposed a data center being built in their community, exactly the kind of backlash a $42 billion "dividend" is designed to blunt.
Not Everyone Thinks The Policy is Clear
Not everyone thinks that shift adds up to a real policy.
"This is definitely closer to the Intel/Nvidia scenario and continues the shell game trend around the hyperscalers," Valence Howden, Advisory Fellow at Info-Tech Research Group, said to Newsweek. "This isn't economic doctrine because of the conflict of interest and risks that this generates. If the government owns a share in this and other AI companies, it loses incentive to regulate them, passes some of the costs if they are incurred to the general public, and creates global risk based on the influence the US government, in this case, can apply to its use, access to its information, and who gets access to it. It's going to amplify the sovereignty aspect of AI globally and likely will have a cooling effect on global adoption due to the geopolitical risk this exposes."
And not everyone in the industry is cheering. David Sacks, the venture capitalist and White House AI czar, has warned publicly that government equity stakes risk what he called "corporate-government fusion," writing on X that "America won't win the AI race if we beat China but end up with a CCP-style social credit system." Some investors, according to reports, view Altman's proposal as more of a political gesture than a genuine wealth-sharing mechanism. Basically, a way to look cooperative without actually ceding control, since a passive 5 percent stake would come with no board seat and no governance rights.
For now, Altman's rivals haven't signed on, Congress hasn't been asked to authorize anything, and the mechanics of turning 5 percent of a private AI lab into an Alaska-style dividend check remain unsolved. There are, however, routes to get there. "They do have a few legal paths to taking an equity stake, especially if it's framed as being critical to national security, which is already the framing between the US and Anthropic," Howden said. "Otherwise, it can be instantiated via Congress under specific conditions."
But the politics are clear enough: this is an administration that has already made equity stakes in Intel, Nvidia, and AMD a signature economic move. Offering Washington a piece of the action lets it write Americans a check and call it "America First" whatever the real motive behind the gesture.
View 0 Comments
Submit Correction
View Editorial & AI Guidelines