OpenAI floats 5% US government stake
OpenAI proposed giving the US government a 5% stake, worth about $42.6B, via a sovereign wealth fund covering leading AI labs, per FT reporting July 2.
OpenAI has offered to give the US government a 5% ownership position, according to Financial Times reporting on July 2 that cites two people familiar with the talks. At OpenAI’s $852 billion post-money valuation from its March round, the holding would be worth roughly $42.6 billion. CEO Sam Altman reportedly framed public ownership as the best way to share AI’s upside, and raised the idea in early discussions with the Trump administration.
The proposal goes beyond OpenAI. Under the reported arrangement, Washington would hold 5% of each leading US AI developer through a sovereign wealth fund vehicle, with Anthropic, Google, and Meta named as candidates. None had commented by publication, and a Reuters source said the administration and Anthropic have not discussed any stake. The context is heavy government pressure: the White House shaped GPT-5.6’s release in June, and export controls kept top Claude models offline for most of a month.
A government with equity in the labs it regulates is a genuinely new structure for this industry, closer to how states hold golden shares in defense contractors than to anything in software.
The idea has a Senate cousin: Bernie Sanders proposed an AI sovereign wealth fund in June, though his version targeted a far larger public share. For operators the near-term question stays practical: political leverage over labs has already moved model availability once this summer.