In a sign of how tangled the relationship between artificial intelligence and the state has become, OpenAI has reportedly floated an idea few American companies ever would: letting the government own a piece of it.
OpenAI has held early-stage discussions about giving the U.S. government a roughly 5% stake, the Financial Times reported, as relayed by Bloomberg. At OpenAI's recent $852 billion valuation — reached in a funding round earlier this year — a 5% holding would be worth around $43 billion. Chief executive Sam Altman and other executives are said to have pitched a broader version in which Washington would hold 5% of each leading U.S. AI developer, potentially including Anthropic, Google and Meta, though it's unclear whether the others would agree, CNBC reported. Altman has discussed the idea with President Trump and with the Treasury and Commerce secretaries, per the reports. The talks are preliminary, and no deal has been struck.
The idea, and the model behind it
The concept floated is less a sale than a grant of equity to the public, structured to share AI's gains broadly. Reports liken it to Alaska's Permanent Fund — a state-owned fund seeded with oil revenue that pays annual dividends to residents. The pitch, in effect: if AI generates enormous wealth, give citizens a direct financial stake in it. (An equity stake is an ownership share in a company; owning 5% means owning 5% of the enterprise's value.)
Why this is so unusual
In the United States, the government almost never owns pieces of private companies. It has done so mainly in emergencies — most notably the 2008 financial crisis, when it took temporary stakes in banks and automakers to prevent collapse, then sold them. Standing government ownership of a thriving private firm cuts against a long American preference for keeping the state out of the boardroom, on the theory that it can distort competition, invite political meddling in business decisions, and create conflicts of interest — including for the same government that regulates the industry.
That last point is the crux. OpenAI is under intense political and regulatory pressure in Washington — over AI safety, national security, and competition — and a government ownership stake would bind the company and the state together in unprecedented ways. Supporters frame it as sharing the upside of a transformative technology; skeptics see tangled incentives, with the government both owning and policing the most powerful AI firms.
Why it matters
For investors and the tech industry, even the discussion is striking: it signals that the AI boom has grown so large, and so entwined with national power, that once-unthinkable ownership structures are on the table. For OpenAI, a state stake could buy political goodwill and regulatory breathing room — but at the cost of independence and fresh conflict-of-interest questions. And for the public, the proposal reframes a live debate: who should capture the wealth if AI proves as economically transformative as its champions claim? Boursel takes no position and stresses this is an early, reported idea, not a done deal; the takeaway is that the line between Big AI and the government is blurring — and both sides are, apparently, willing to discuss erasing it further.
