Jul 3, 2026
OpenAI is weighing the idea of handing the U.S. government a 5% ownership stake in the company, CEO Sam Altman's opening move in a broader plan that would have every leading American AI developer pay a matching slice of equity into a public fund, the Financial Times reported Thursday, citing two people familiar with the talks. Altman pitched a stake of that size directly to the administration as a way to give the public a financial interest in the technology, according to the report.
To be clear, since OpenAI closed a $122 billion funding round in March at a post-money valuation of $852 billion — the largest private financing in history — the value of the Trump administration’s 5% slice in the ChatGPT maker would be roughly $42.6 billion. That's more than the government paid for its entire position in Intel, and it would be a gift rather than a purchase.
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The talks are still early: The FT described them as "conceptual," and any actual deal would likely need an act of Congress to become real. OpenAI and the White House both declined to comment. But the discussions matter because, in the broader context, both Washington and Silicon Valley are both trying to figure out who will reap the financial upside of AI, and whether everyday Americans will see any of it at all.
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Why OpenAI would give the U.S. government a stake
On its face, volunteering to hand over tens of billions of dollars in equity makes little sense. But despite AI’s popularity, the companies working on it are having a rough go in D.C., and Altman is trying to buy goodwill with the currency the administration seems to want most: ownership. Just ask Japan’s Nippon Steel.
Even in just the past few weeks, the government asked OpenAI to limit the release of its GPT-5.6 model to a small group of approved partners, citing the model's capabilities. Rival Anthropic spent most of June with its most advanced models — Fable 5 and Mythos 5 — switched off worldwide to comply with U.S. export controls, the first such controls ever applied to an AI model rather than to computer chips. Access was restored on July 1. Both companies are also preparing to go public, which raises the stakes on staying in the government's good graces. Giving Washington a piece of the action, one would think, essentially turns a regulator into a business partner by giving the government a reason to want these companies to succeed.
Last August, the Trump administration took a 9.9% stake in Intel, buying 433.3 million shares at $20.47 apiece for an $8.9 billion investment funded by converting unpaid CHIPS Act grants into equity. Trump had publicly called for Intel's CEO to resign shortly before the deal; afterward, he swung behind the company. He's since said the government should have negotiated for more, and floated similar arrangements with other companies. Nvidia and AMD, meanwhile, agreed to hand over 15% of their China chip sales in exchange for export licenses. In case you couldn’t tell, the Trump administration likes equity and leverage in equal measure.
What Altman is proposing is different in one important way. Intel traded shares for a large slug of government funding, but OpenAI would be trading equity without receiving cash in return. Altman first floated the idea of a government stake to the administration in early 2025, according to CNBC, so this would not be a snap decision.
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The Alaska Permanent Fund: A 50-year-old blueprint
Altman and his executives continually reference the Alaska Permanent Fund. For context, Alaska voters created the fund in 1976, amending the state constitution to require that at least 25% of oil and mineral royalties be set aside and invested rather than spent. The idea was to lock some of the state's oil wealth away and let it generate income in perpetuity. Starting in 1982, the fund began paying every resident an annual dividend — the first checks were $1,000 — and it has done so nearly every year since. Today, the fund is worth more than $80 billion.
Altman's pitch essentially borrows that logic, but swaps oil for AI. Under his framework, the leading U.S. developers — potentially including Google, Meta and Anthropic — would each contribute 5% of their equity to a fund built along Alaska's lines, which would eventually distribute the returns to the public.
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OpenAI has been laying the groundwork for this plan publicly for months. In April, the company proposed a "public wealth fund" that "provides every citizen — including those not invested in financial markets — with a stake in AI-driven economic growth." In May, the OpenAI Foundation, the company's nonprofit arm, argued that in an AI-led future, "society will likely need new approaches that give people durable stakes in the systems creating value."
Whether the other labs go along is another question entirely. None of them — Google, Meta or Anthropic — has said or even signaled it would join, and a voluntary 5% giveaway is a lot to ask of companies with their own investors to answer to.
Altman's 5% is also, for now, the modest end of a debate that runs across the political spectrum. Trump has said publicly he wants Americans to share in AI's gains — "if we do that, the public will become very rich," he told reporters last month — and Vice President JD Vance has said the president prefers equity over cash payouts. On the left, Bernie Sanders wants to go way further than just 5%. In June, the Vermont senator introduced the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, which would impose a one-time 50% tax — paid in stock — on AI companies with more than $200 million in annual revenue, depositing those shares into a public fund his office estimates could hold $7 trillion and pay every American a dividend of more than $1,000 a year. Sanders has met with Altman in recent weeks to press his case.
The gap between 5% and 50% is enormous, but the underlying question is now bipartisan: as AI generates trillions of dollars in value, who owns the gains?
"The goal is not only to support people through economic change after decisions have already been made," the OpenAI Foundation wrote in a May blog post, "but to give them a stake and a voice in shaping how that change unfolds."
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Dave Smith is the VP of Content at Wise Publishing and Editor-in-Chief at Moneywise and Money.ca. His work has also been published in Fortune, Business Insider, Newsweek, ABC News, and USA Today.
