OpenAI Proposes Giving the US Government a 5% Equity Stake
OpenAI reportedly pitched a 5% government stake worth roughly $42.6 billion at its $852B valuation, and wants Anthropic, Google, and Meta to cede similar shares to a sovereign wealth vehicle.
OpenAI has proposed handing the US government a 5% equity stake in the company, according to a Financial Times report first surfaced July 2. At OpenAI’s recent $852 billion valuation, that stake would be worth roughly $42.6 billion.
Sam Altman reportedly frames this as the cleanest way to “share the upside of AI with the public” — but the proposal isn’t limited to OpenAI. It envisions Anthropic, Google, and Meta ceding comparable stakes to a new sovereign wealth fund vehicle designed to hold and distribute the economic gains from frontier AI companies across the US population.
This isn’t a new idea from Altman. He first pitched a government-stake concept to the Trump administration in early 2025, and in April 2026 OpenAI floated a “public wealth fund” proposal along similar lines. What’s changed is the specificity: a named percentage, a named valuation, and reported direct conversations with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.
The stated rationale is political cover. OpenAI has spent 2026 fielding public backlash over AI’s labor-market effects, energy consumption, and now increasingly sharp questions about who actually benefits when a company hits an $852 billion valuation on the back of infrastructure built with public power grids and public goodwill. A direct government equity stake reframes that resentment as shared ownership.
It’s also a hedge against harsher alternatives. Windfall taxes, compute-usage levies, or mandatory revenue-sharing schemes are all live policy conversations in Washington. A voluntary 5% stake is a company choosing its own terms before Congress writes worse ones.
Whether Anthropic, Google, and Meta actually go along is a separate question — OpenAI floating this on their behalf doesn’t bind any of them, and none has publicly confirmed engagement with the framework. Nothing here is signed, and it’s not clear the Trump administration wants direct equity in private AI labs versus a lighter-touch regulatory bargain. Treat this as an opening negotiating position, not a done deal — but one that shows OpenAI thinks the political cost of AI’s wealth concentration is now higher than the cost of giving some of it away.