OpenAI has proposed handing the U.S. government a 5% equity stake, worth roughly $42.6 billion against the $852 billion post-money valuation set in March, and Sam Altman is pitching it as an industry-wide template that would ask Google, Meta and Anthropic to allot the same 5% to a joint investment vehicle modeled on the Alaska Permanent Fund. The Financial Times broke the story Thursday. Altman, per two people familiar with the talks, has walked the pitch through President Trump, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and Senator Bernie Sanders, framing public equity as the best way to share the upside of AI.

Trump, for his part, has already called the idea of Washington owning a piece of the AI giants “a beautiful thing” that would make Americans “partners in this revolution.”

The timing is the story. Six days before the FT scoop, OpenAI delayed the full public launch of GPT-5.6 at the government’s request, with Lutnick reportedly warning Altman against shipping without prior approval. For most of June, Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 sat disabled worldwide under the first U.S. export controls ever applied to an AI model rather than to hardware; access wasn’t restored until July 1. Read in sequence, Altman’s offer looks less like largesse and more like the price of continued release cadence.

There’s precedent for the mechanic. Last August the federal government converted CHIPS Act grants into a 9.9% Intel stake at $20.47 a share; AMD and Nvidia have separately agreed to hand over 15% of their China AI chip revenue. The Intel deal took a subsidy and made it equity. Altman’s proposal takes political exposure and does the same.

Sanders is playing a different game. His American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, filed in June, would demand 50% of voting shares from U.S. AI companies, valuing the resulting fund at $7 trillion and cutting every American a $1,000 annual dividend. Altman’s 5% is, among other things, a counteroffer.

The FT notes discussions remain conceptual and any deal would likely require congressional approval. It’s also worth noting who else is at the table: nobody. Anthropic told CNBC the administration hasn’t raised the topic. Google and Meta are named in Altman’s vehicle but haven’t signed on. The pitch, for now, is one CEO’s, offered on behalf of an industry that hasn’t been consulted.

Sources