Sam Altman Floats Plan to Give US Govt 5% OpenAI Stake: Report
The proposal reframes a fundamental question: Who should benefit from the economic value created by frontier AI?
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[Image: Chetan Jha/MITSMR Middle East]
OpenAI has discussed granting the U.S. government a 5% ownership stake in the company as part of a broader proposal to give the public a financial interest in the country’s artificial intelligence industry, according to a Financial Times report citing people familiar with the discussions.
The proposal, which remains at an early conceptual stage, was reportedly introduced by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman during conversations with President Donald Trump, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and, more recently, Senator Bernie Sanders.
Rather than applying it solely to OpenAI, Altman is understood to have suggested that all leading U.S. AI developers contribute 5% of their equity to a national investment vehicle modeled on the Alaska Permanent Fund, which distributes annual dividends to Alaska residents from the state’s oil revenues.
At OpenAI’s reported $852 billion valuation from its March funding round, a 5% stake would be worth approximately $42.6 billion. Any such arrangement would likely require congressional approval.
The proposal signals an emerging debate over whether the economic value created by frontier AI should accrue primarily to private companies or be shared more broadly. Unlike previous calls for public ownership, Altman’s reported proposal stops well short of government control.
Senator Sanders’ American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, introduced in June, proposed a far more ambitious model in which the government would acquire 50% of the voting shares of major AI companies through a sovereign wealth fund, with the aim of financing annual dividend payments to Americans.
Over the past year, Washington has expanded its use of equity stakes and revenue-sharing agreements alongside traditional industrial policy. The federal government converted portions of CHIPS Act funding into a 9.9% equity stake in Intel, while AMD and Nvidia agreed to share a portion of their China-related chip revenues in exchange for export licenses.
OpenAI has previously endorsed the idea of a public wealth fund in policy recommendations published earlier this year, and CNBC reported that Altman first raised the possibility of government equity participation with the administration in early 2025.
The reported discussions come less than a week after OpenAI delayed the wider release of GPT-5.6 following requests from the administration, while Anthropic only recently restored global access to its Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models after temporary restrictions linked to the first U.S. export controls applied directly to AI models.
