OpenAI has floated giving the US government a 5 percent ownership stake as a way of easing tensions with the Trump administration and blunting mounting public backlash against AI, according to the Financial Times. CEO Sam Altman argued that giving the public a financial interest in the company would be the best way to share the upside of AI, the FT reported, citing two unnamed people familiar with the talks. He is said to have first pitched the idea to Trump early last year, and Altman reportedly suggested the 5 percent figure.
Based on OpenAI's latest funding round, which valued the company at $852 billion, the stake would be worth roughly $42.6 billion. The discussions are reportedly still in their early stages, and the proposal would involve other US AI companies giving the government similar stakes. It is unclear whether they would agree to such a deal.
The proposal lands amid the Trump administration's unusually hands-on approach to AI, which has repeatedly stymied competitor Anthropic. Earlier this year, the Pentagon designated OpenAI a supply chain risk, and last month the administration unexpectedly slapped its latest models with export controls, forcing them to be pulled from the market. The US government has already taken a 10 percent stake in chipmaker Intel and reportedly demanded Nvidia and AMD give the federal government a 15 percent cut of their revenue from AI chip sales to China. Senator Bernie Sanders has separately suggested a one-time 50 percent tax on AI stock value to establish a sovereign wealth fund.