A state owned investment pool has become the live question in Washington. Sam Altman is pitching it as voluntary philanthropy; Bernie Sanders wants to fund it with a one time 50% tax on the biggest AI labs.
Sam Altman has proposed donating roughly 5% of OpenAI's equity to a US sovereign wealth fund, and is asking other AI companies to make comparable pledges. The Financial Times reported the proposal on Wednesday, citing two people familiar with the matter, and the story quickly rippled through TechCrunch, CNBC, and the Guardian.
Read in isolation, the pitch looks like philanthropy: OpenAI giving the American public a slice of itself, with peers encouraged to follow. The FT's own framing is colder. The proposal, the paper reported, is meant to "secure good relations with the administration and... address political blowback." That is a political hedge dressed as a gift.
The why-now hook is concrete. President Trump confirmed in June that his administration had discussed "concepts where pieces could be given to the American public, where the American public essentially becomes a partner with the companies," as CNBC reported at the time. OpenAI's own policy paper, "Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age", lays out a framework that overlaps with the proposal, suggesting the company has been laying the groundwork for months.
Then this week, Senator Bernie Sanders introduced the alternative. His American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, a one-time 50% tax on systemically important AI companies with the proceeds funding a roughly $7 trillion public vehicle, shares Altman's premise and rejects his mechanism. Where Altman offers a voluntary equity carve-out, Sanders wants to compel one by law. Where Altman's plan would need buy-in from rival labs, Sanders' plan would need buy-in from 50 senators.
Both proposals rest on the same bet: that the public is entitled to a durable claim on AI-generated value. They differ on what "entitled" means. Altman's version is opt-in and reversible. Sanders' version is mandatory and permanent. Neither has been priced. Both would, in any realistic scenario, require congressional approval, a constraint that makes Altman's pitch read less like a finished gift and more like an opening offer designed to shape the negotiation in Washington.
What to watch next: whether Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and xAI follow OpenAI's lead; whether the Trump administration endorses the voluntary frame as the alternative to taxation; and whether Sanders' bill attracts a single Republican co-sponsor. Each move resets the table, and the next one may come from any of those three corners.