Sam Altman is in early stage talks for the US government to take a small equity slice of OpenAI, with Anthropic explicitly included in the proposal and Google and Meta as an open question for follow on participation.
For 50 years, every Alaskan, from newborns to retirees, has received a yearly check from the state's oil wealth. The Alaska Permanent Fund, set up in 1976 after the Trans-Alaska Pipeline began moving crude, invests a share of state oil revenue and pays an annual dividend to every state resident, regardless of income. Sam Altman is now pitching Washington on building the same arrangement for artificial intelligence, and asking the federal government to take an ownership stake in OpenAI to make it happen.
The Financial Times reported Wednesday that OpenAI is in early-stage talks to give the US government roughly a 5% equity stake in the company, citing people familiar with the discussions. The Guardian confirmed the talks, and the proposal would, in OpenAI's framing, extend to other major US AI labs: Anthropic explicitly, with Google and Meta as an open question, handing Washington a small slice of each. The mechanism is described as conceptual and would likely require an act of Congress to implement.
If the structure sounds familiar, that is the point. Altman has spent the past year arguing in public that AI's gains should not accrue only to the companies that build it, and that giving the public a financial stake is the cleanest way to distribute them. In effect, he is asking Washington to act as the conduit, collecting equity in OpenAI and similar labs and routing the returns to American households through some version of a national sovereign wealth fund. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont published his own version of the idea in the Guardian in June, a federal AI sovereign wealth fund, suggesting the policy has at least surfaced across the political spectrum, even if the political coalitions backing it look very different.
The mechanics, however, are not close to settled. No valuation has been disclosed, no transfer structure has been proposed, and no governance terms have been sketched. The 5% figure would mean very different things depending on whether it is structured as diluted equity, non-voting preferred shares, warrants, or a sovereign-fund-style vehicle. Each carries distinct market and policy consequences, and the public reporting does not yet distinguish between them. As of Wednesday, there was no on-record confirmation from OpenAI, the White House, Treasury, or any of the named peer AI companies.
The political backdrop matters for the read. The proposal lands as OpenAI and its peers navigate a more confrontational posture from the Trump administration, including a recent order that in June briefly suspended Anthropic's newest model over national-security access restrictions before access was restored. Reporting on the OpenAI talks frames the idea in part as smoothing those relations and converting AI wealth into political support, or, as critics have already begun to characterize it, industry buying regulatory peace.
That critique is real and should not be erased. Government equity stakes in private companies create conflicts of interest the Treasury Department is not structurally set up to manage, and concentrate political leverage over firms the government is also meant to regulate. But it does not fully explain the proposal either. The Alaska template Altman appears to be borrowing from is not a tribute mechanism. It is a working 50-year-old program, a state-level sovereign wealth fund that pays every Alaska resident a yearly dividend from oil-revenue investments, and one that has survived because Alaskans have made removing it politically toxic.
The next concrete tells are short and specific. Watch for whether Anthropic, Google, or Meta publicly endorse or reject the idea, whether Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent or Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick confirms that conversations are happening, whether Sanders and Altman cross-endorse given both have spoken to each other, and whether any draft legislation emerges that even sketches the structure. Until one of those breaks, the 5% number remains a reported proposal, the most concrete version yet of an idea that has been floating from Sanders's op-ed page to Silicon Valley investor calls for the past year.