Andrew Warren
OpenAI (OPENAI) has offered the U.S. government a 5% equity stake in the company, a move that would put roughly $42.6 billion of paper value into a sovereign wealth style vehicle and set a template other AI labs may be pressured to follow.
Terms Under Discussion
The proposal, first reported by the Financial Times and confirmed by CNBC and Reuters, was pitched by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in conversations with President Donald Trump, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Altman has also spoken with Senator Bernie Sanders, whose own plan for AI equity distribution is far more aggressive. The 5% figure is pegged to OpenAI's $852 billion post money valuation from its March funding round, which puts the stake's paper value at approximately $42.6 billion at that valuation.
A Fund Modeled on Alaska's Oil Dividend
Altman's framework calls for a government owned vehicle structured similarly to the Alaska Permanent Fund, the mechanism that distributes state oil revenue to Alaska residents as annual checks. Under the plan, other major AI developers, specifically Anthropic, Google and Meta, would each contribute a 5% equity slice into the same pool. None of those firms has confirmed participation, and it remains an open question whether they would accept dilution on those terms. CNN has reported that implementing the structure could require congressional legislation rather than executive action alone. Neither OpenAI nor the White House has responded to requests for comment on the arrangement.
The Political Backdrop: Scrutiny and Precedent
The timing lines up with intensifying government involvement in frontier AI development. OpenAI pushed back the full public rollout of GPT 5.6 last week after a request from federal officials, while Anthropic (ANTHROPIC) had cut off foreign national access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models over national security concerns before the government reversed those restrictions on Tuesday. There is already a working precedent for direct government stakes in private tech companies: last August, an $8.9 billion investment gave Washington a 10% ownership position in Intel (INTC) common stock. Trump said in May that the government should have pushed for a larger share of Intel in that negotiation, a comment that suggests the administration sees these equity arrangements as underpriced rather than one off favors.
Both OpenAI and Anthropic have filed confidential paperwork for initial public offerings, a step that would eventually let retail investors buy shares directly rather than through venture rounds or employee stock programs. That timeline matters here: a public listing would give the government's stake, and any future dividend fund built around it, an actual trading price rather than a valuation pulled from a private funding round.
Sanders' Rival, More Sweeping Plan
Separately, Sanders has floated a proposal that goes considerably further than Altman's 5% offer. His version would move 50% of equity in leading AI companies into a public fund, hand the government board seats and voting power, and distribute proceeds to Americans as a universal dividend. The gap between the two proposals, one at 5% with no governance rights mentioned and one at 50% with board control, illustrates how contested the terms of public AI ownership have become even among people broadly sympathetic to the idea of shared upside. Altman has framed broader public ownership as the fairest way to spread AI's financial gains, particularly to Americans without exposure to stock markets, an idea he first outlined in an April proposal for a fund that would take positions in AI firms and return proceeds to the public.
