OpenAI offers Uncle Sam a 5% cut

If you cannot beat the regulators, make them your shareholders.

OpenAI has floated giving the US government a 5 percent ownership stake in the company, according to a report from the Financial Times. The move is designed to ease tensions with the Trump administration, dodge heavy-handed regulation, and soften growing public pushback against generative AI.

CEO Sam Altman reportedly first pitched the concept directly to Donald Trump early last year and floated the 5 percent figure himself. Following OpenAI's recent funding round that valued the startup at a staggering $852 billion, that slice of equity is worth roughly $42.6 billion.

Bringing the rest of the industry along

Altman argued to officials that giving the public a direct financial stake in OpenAI would be the cleanest way to share the upside of the AI boom, according to people familiar with the talks.

The discussions are still early, but the proposal does not stop at OpenAI. The plan reportedly suggests that other major US AI companies hand over similar equity stakes to the federal government. Whether competitors would ever voluntarily agree to such an arrangement remains entirely unclear.

The proposal arrives during an increasingly aggressive period of state intervention under the Trump administration. OpenAI's main rival, Anthropic, has faced repeated government crackdowns this year. The Pentagon designated Anthropic a supply chain risk, and the administration unexpectedly placed export controls on its latest models last month, forcing the company to yank them from the market.

Washington's appetite for capturing AI wealth has been building on both sides of the aisle. The Trump administration already secured a 10 percent stake in Intel and reportedly demanded a 15 percent cut of Nvidia and AMD's Chinese AI chip revenues. Meanwhile, Senator Bernie Sanders has argued AI is a public resource, proposing a one-time 50 percent tax on AI stock valuations to fund a sovereign wealth fund.

Why it matters

Altman is playing a very sharp, if dangerous, game of political poker.

On paper, sacrificing 5 percent of equity looks like an expensive bribe, but for OpenAI, $42.6 billion in stock is a small price to pay to avoid the fate of Anthropic. By making the US government an equity partner, OpenAI essentially ties Washington's financial interests to its own success, creating the ultimate regulatory shield and cementing its place as the state's favored national champion.

The downside, however, is massive. If federal equity becomes the cost of doing business in American AI, innovation takes a back seat to political patronage. Dragging other frontier labs into the deal looks like an attempt to standardize a tax that OpenAI can afford far more easily than smaller rivals.

For developers and users, a state-owned OpenAI might promise regulatory stability, but it raises serious red flags around surveillance, censorship, and independence. When the White House owns a cut of the biggest model in tech, the boundary between public oversight and state-sponsored monopoly completely vanishes.