OpenAI Proposes 5% Stake for US Government in AI Regulatory Alignment

OpenAI has opened early discussions with the White House about giving the US government a roughly 5% stake in the company, the Financial Times reported, as part of a broader proposal to give Washington an ownership position across leading AI developers . CEO Sam Altman has pitched the idea directly to President Trump, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, though both sides describe the talks as conceptual and still in early stages.

Under Altman's proposal, the government's equity would sit inside a sovereign-wealth-style vehicle modeled on the Alaska Permanent Fund, which channels state oil revenue into annual resident dividends, extending the concept to other AI developers such as Anthropic, Google, and Meta so the public could share in AI's financial upside . At OpenAI's roughly $852 billion private valuation, a 5% stake would be worth close to $42.6 billion. MSFT, OpenAI's largest financial backer, was not reported as part of the initial proposal.

The proposal lands as OpenAI faces mounting political scrutiny in Washington, including a delayed rollout of GPT-5.6, and could set a precedent other frontier labs come under pressure to match. Not everyone in Washington sees it as sufficient: Senator Bernie Sanders has separately called for a one-time 50% tax on the equity of OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI, dismissing Altman's 5% offer as a watered-down substitute for meaningful public ownership. Any formal arrangement would likely require congressional approval, and it remains to be seen how a new government stake would interact with Microsoft's existing equity and revenue-sharing agreements with OpenAI.