OpenAI has floated handing the U.S. government a 5% ownership stake in the company, the Financial Times reported Thursday, part of a wider plan that would ask every leading American AI lab to contribute equity to a public fund. At the $852 billion valuation OpenAI set in its March funding round, that slice is worth around $42.6 billion on paper.
Sam Altman reportedly pitched the idea to President Trump, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and has talked it over with Senator Bernie Sanders in recent weeks. The FT report frames the donation, per two people familiar with the talks, as a way to secure good relations with the administration and defuse political blowback.
The Alaska comparison
The structure borrows from the Alaska Permanent Fund, which pays annual dividends to state residents out of oil revenue. Swap oil for AI equity and you get the pitch: a government-seeded pool that eventually cuts checks to ordinary Americans. OpenAI laid the groundwork in an April policy paper, Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age, which proposed a "Public Wealth Fund" that governments and AI companies would seed together.
That $42.6 billion figure deserves an asterisk. It rests on a private valuation set months ago in a funding round, not a market price, and OpenAI has reportedly filed confidentially for an IPO said to target a $1 trillion valuation. A 5% stake is a moving number, and nobody outside the cap table really knows what it settles at.
Will the other labs play along?
Here's the catch. Altman's version only works if Google, Meta, Anthropic, and the rest hand over matching 5% slices, and none of them have signaled they will. Asking your competitors to co-sign a multi-billion-dollar gift to Washington is a tough sell, and the plan collapses into a solo OpenAI donation without them.
The administration has run a version of this before. Washington took a 9.9% stake in Intel last August by converting CHIPS Act grants into equity, and squeezed revenue-share deals out of Nvidia and AMD on China chip sales. Trump told reporters the arrangement "almost becomes a partnership with the American public," which sounds warmer than it is.
The obvious problem
If the government becomes a shareholder in the company it's supposed to regulate, it ends up on both sides of the table. Critics have pointed out the conflict directly: an administration holding equity has a financial reason to go easy on the frontier lab it owns a piece of. The timing sharpens the point. The proposal surfaced days after OpenAI delayed the full launch of GPT-5.6 at the government's request.
Sanders, for his part, has floated a competing route: a one-time 50% tax on major AI firms' stock rather than a voluntary equity handover. His bill hasn't moved in Congress.
And that's the wall this runs into. Per the FT, any formal deal would likely need congressional approval, which turns a conceptual pitch into a legislative fight. Watch for an official White House or OpenAI response accepting, rejecting, or reshaping the 5% figure, and whether any rival lab breaks ranks to join.
