Sam Altman is reportedly offering the US government a 5% stake in OpenAI. At the company’s $852 billion valuation from March, that’s worth roughly $42.6 billion.
The Financial Times broke the story, citing sources familiar with the talks. Altman pitched the idea directly to President Trump, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
The plan would work like a sovereign wealth fund — think the Alaska Permanent Fund, which pays annual dividends to state residents from oil revenues. Altman wants the American public to share in AI’s economic upside.
He’s not stopping with OpenAI either. The proposal reportedly asks Anthropic, Google, and Meta to each hand over a similar 5% stake through the same vehicle. None of them have signed on yet. Big surprise there.
The timing’s interesting. OpenAI just launched GPT-5.6 in limited form after the White House asked for a restricted rollout. That followed the government slapping emergency export controls on Anthropic’s top models for most of June.
The Trump administration has been using equity as a tool lately. The government took a 9.9% stake in Intel last August for $8.9 billion — now worth well over $50 billion. AMD and Nvidia agreed to hand over 15% of their China chip revenues for export licenses.
The talks are still early and conceptual. Any deal would likely need Congressional approval. But if it goes through, it’d be the first time Washington holds equity in a private AI company. Senator Bernie Sanders is pushing an even more aggressive bill that would take 50% of large AI companies’ equity for a public fund.
For OpenAI, navigating a confidential IPO filing and a probe from 42 state attorneys general, the deal might be worth it.
