Jun 12, 2026
As the AI boom rages on, President Trump continues to muse about the U.S. government partnering with the AI industry so that Americans can get a piece of the action.
When speaking with reporters gathered in the Oval Office, Trump recently said he plans to meet with the AI industry’s top “12 or 15 executives” to talk about “giving back something to the public,” The New York Times reports.
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“If we do that, the public will become very rich.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Moneywise on which AI executives are expected to attend.
It’s the second time in a week that Trump suggested designing a way for Americans to directly benefit from the explosion in AI-related spending among U.S. tech companies and the anticipated profits. However, it’s unclear how such an arrangement would be structured without significantly deepening the federal government’s role in the private sector, which has long been anathema to Republicans.
Trump first suggested the idea of a U.S. government stake in AI companies as a way to improve AI’s lackluster standing among Americans at the beginning of June.
“There are concepts where pieces could be given to the American public, where the American public essentially becomes a partner with the companies,” said Trump, according to Politico. “The American people can benefit from the success of AI — and by doing that, they’re going to like it better.”
Multiple surveys show mounting skepticism among Americans about AI’s benefits due to fears over job losses and frustration with surging electricity bills from an accelerated deployment of data centers. On the latter, seven in ten Americans are opposed to the presence of a data center near their home, according to a Heatmap poll.
AI is under Washington’s spotlight
NOTUS reported last week that AI executives were caught off guard by Trump’s announcement of a White House meeting.
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Some CEOs in the AI industry have become more active in Washington as policymakers grapple with how to police the AI industry. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman met with Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont in early June to discuss AI regulation.
“This is a real change to society,” Altman told reporters, according to the Associated Press. “I think it’s possible both that people can use AI a lot and like using it and also have anxiety about what it’s going to do for the future.”
Sanders recently rolled out a proposal for a one-time, 50% megatax on AI firms’ stock, with the ensuing revenue placed in a sovereign wealth fund that would issue direct payments to Americans. The proposal would also nationalize AI companies with the U.S. government taking a controlling stake in their management and decision-making. Altman expressed support for an identical tax that’s payable in company shares and payments redistributed to Americans back in 2021.
The Trump administration has also started moving forward with some optional guardrails. Trump recently signed an executive order requesting tech companies to voluntarily allow the U.S. government a 30-day period for reviewing AI models before their public release.
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AI industry has ideas of its own
Altman’s endorsement of a publicly-held wealth fund wasn’t a surprise. In April, the company released a 13-page policy document that supported the creation of a public fund that issues payments to workers displaced by AI.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei also recently encouraged policymakers to take a fresh look at universal basic income in the event of mass job displacement.
“If AI-driven labor displacement ends up being large in magnitude and permanently drives down the demand for labor, it will likely be necessary to go beyond mere incentive programs to long-term income support for a significant fraction of the labor force,” he wrote on his personal site.
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Joseph Zeballos-Roig is a policy and politics journalist based in Washington D.C with a focus on economics. He is experienced in connecting the significance of events in the capital to the lives of everyday Americans whether its taxes, tariffs, interest rates or federal programs.
