OpenAI has proposed handing the United States government a 5 percent equity stake in the company, an interest worth roughly $42.6 billion against the $852 billion post-money valuation set in the record March funding round. The Financial Times, citing two people familiar with the talks, reported Thursday that chief executive Sam Altman has pitched the idea directly to President Trump, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and has floated extending the same arrangement to Anthropic, Google, and Meta.

The framing Altman is selling is a “public wealth fund,” a proposal OpenAI formalized in April and modeled on the Alaska Permanent Fund, which has distributed annual oil-revenue dividends to state residents since 1976. Altman has argued, per the FT, that giving the public a direct financial interest is the appropriate way to share AI’s upside. It’s a striking sentence to have to construct in defense of a private company.

The political context makes the offer legible. Senator Bernie Sanders has pushed for a 50 percent federal stake in every major American AI developer; 5 percent, in that light, is the counter-anchor. CNBC reported last month that Altman first pitched a version of this concept in early 2025, well before the political blowback around AI concentration had fully organized.

The administration already owns the template. Last year it took a roughly 10 percent stake in Intel and a 15 percent holding in MP Materials, executed largely by converting existing federal grants into equity. Those were industrial-policy interventions dressed as balance-sheet transactions. What Altman is proposing is the inverse: a balance-sheet transaction dressed as industrial policy.

The leverage running the other direction isn’t subtle. Reuters reported that an administration request prompted OpenAI to delay the wide release of GPT-5.6 last week. Anthropic suspended access to Fable and Mythos under an export-control directive; Fortune reported the government lifted the restriction on Mythos on Friday evening and on Fable late Tuesday. Anthropic, Google, and Meta didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Talks, per the FT’s sources, remain “conceptual.” That word is doing considerable work. What’s on the table is the quiet institutionalization of a channel between federal power and frontier-model developers, priced in equity rather than statute, with the Alaska dividend cited as the cover story.

Sources