OpenAI weighs 5% U.S. stake amid growing Washington oversight

OpenAI has held talks about giving the U.S. government a 5% equity stake in the company and placing that stake into a public investment vehicle that would channel returns to American residents. People familiar with the discussions describe the idea as exploratory and conceptual.

At OpenAI’s current valuation of about $852 billion, a 5% stake would be worth roughly $42 billion. Company leaders have discussed modeling the vehicle on the Alaska Permanent Fund, which invests resource revenue and pays annual dividends to state residents. Creating a similar structure for AI equity would likely require congressional approval and detailed legal design.

Executives have explored encouraging other large AI developers, including Anthropic, Google and Meta, to allocate similar stakes to the government, but it is not clear whether those companies would agree to that arrangement. OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman, has held conversations with senior administration officials, including President Donald Trump, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Altman has also met with Senator Bernie Sanders, who has proposed a sovereign wealth fund overseen by an independent commission and financed by a one-time 50% tax on shares of the largest AI firms.

President Trump described government ownership of AI equity as “a beautiful thing” that would make Americans “partners in this revolution,” and administration officials have publicly discussed ways to widen Americans’ financial participation in the AI sector.

The talks come as federal authorities have increased scrutiny of advanced models. OpenAI paused the full public rollout of GPT-5.6 at the request of the government. Regulators earlier ordered Anthropic to suspend foreign access to two of its frontier models on national security grounds; those restrictions were later lifted.

There is precedent for federal equity stakes in technology companies. In August 2025 the U.S. government acquired a 9.9% stake in Intel at a discounted valuation after intervening to support the company. Officials have pointed to that transaction when discussing public participation in corporate value creation.

OpenAI and Anthropic are preparing for eventual U.S. public listings. Some investors project that each company could be worth more than $1 trillion in an IPO. Participants in the current talks say many legal, political and commercial questions remain unresolved, including how a fund would be governed, how returns would be distributed to citizens and whether other AI developers would accept government equity.