OpenAI has floated handing the United States government a roughly 5 percent equity stake, worth about $42.6 billion against its most recent $852 billion post-money valuation, according to a Financial Times report citing two people familiar with the talks. Sam Altman has personally raised the concept with President Trump, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and separately with Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont Democrat whose posture on tech-billionaire wealth capture makes him a strategically chosen interlocutor.

The vehicle Altman has described is modelled on the Alaska Permanent Fund, and would require every leading American developer, Anthropic, Google, Meta Platforms, to allot a matching 5 percent share. It would likely need an act of Congress. OpenAI executives are calling the pitch conceptual.

It’s also, plainly, a preemptive maneuver. In recent weeks the federal government has been flexing at the frontier lab tier: last week OpenAI delayed the full public launch of GPT-5.6 at the administration’s request, and over roughly a fortnight the Commerce Department lifted export curbs on Anthropic’s Fable and Mythos systems. The message from Washington is that access to global markets and product timelines is now a policy variable. Altman’s response is to offer equity, and to argue, per the FT, that public ownership is the best way to let ordinary Americans share in the technology’s rewards.

The precedent is fresh. Last August, Washington took a 10 percent shareholding in Intel after an $8.9 billion investment in the chipmaker’s common stock, and has taken positions in MP Materials on similar national-interest logic. Trump said last month he was exploring options to give the public an interest in leading A.I. companies, calling the prospect “a beautiful thing” and describing Americans as “partners in this revolution.”

Some investors believe OpenAI and Anthropic could each list above $1 trillion. Both firms have advanced public wealth funds and digital dividends in policy papers, which reframes this week’s news as the operational moment for a position they’ve already staked rhetorically. Indranil Bandyopadhyay, an analyst at Forrester, told the Guardian that a pre-listing government stake might reassure American investors about regulatory risk but would invite other jurisdictions to demand comparable arrangements.

OpenAI declined to comment. The White House didn’t respond to inquiries. A person familiar with the matter told CNBC that the administration and Anthropic haven’t discussed a government stake. That last detail is the tell: the proposal is Altman’s, and the industry hasn’t been consulted on being conscripted into it.

Sources