OpenAI ‘in early talks to give 5% stake to US government’

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/02/openai-stake-us-government-ai-sam-altman

by tosh • 21 days ago

134 144 21 days ago

bityard2• 21 days ago

Does OpenAI not have mandatory compliance training which forbids them from giving any government a bribe as a condition of doing business?

micromacrofoot2• 21 days ago

thats for employees so they don't profit from government deals

bityard2• 21 days ago

You're saying it's not bribery if the CEO does it?

frumiousirc• 21 days ago

I'd settle for Altman and his ilk paying a proper progressive income tax.

rasz• 21 days ago

This is how they will secure eventual bailout.

radiator• 21 days ago

But what would happen if no bailout came? I did not keep count of how many trillion USD they owe, but if we let OpenAI fail, what would be the consequences for ordinary people?

eiejee• 21 days ago

Nothing

If OAI blew up now a whole lotta of people who supplied money would be angry.

But those people are generally not the common person

But the pushback will be — ‘but china!’

Mistletoe• 21 days ago

My Mom wouldn’t be able to make AI images of her dog Chico as a pirate anymore.

torben-friis• 21 days ago

Isn't this mostly circular? Let pichai, nadella and friends hold the bag. We'll be fine.

CuriouslyC3• 21 days ago

Before, Microsoft would have absorbed most of OAI, and other than a speed bump in our AI progress, I think we'd have mostly been fine.

With a taxpayer stake in the company the odds that a corrupt administration will throw good money after bad due to corruption or stupidity goes way up.

cmrdporcupine3• 21 days ago

This is how they will get permission to release GPT 5.6

rvz• 21 days ago

Both of you are correct. This is bailout attempt #2.

osiris970• 21 days ago

Isn't this what people wanted? The public to have access to the gains of these companies?

I don't want public ownership of any private companies but this seems to be what slopulism leads us to

gcr• 21 days ago

um, no? “The government” owning a stake in OpenAI is different from “the people” owning a stake.

How are you reading that differently?

CuriouslyC3• 21 days ago

This is a trick to lock in "too big to fail" status and have leverage to lobby the government to ban "dangerous" Chinese models that are "robbing the taxpayer". 100% Trojan horse.

A_D_E_P_T• 20 days ago

100%. I'd add: Whoever hasn't downloaded GLM 5.2 should download GLM 5.2 immediately.

Grombobulous• 21 days ago

The voter base who hates big government and communism is getting USSR-style state owned industry from its beloved leaders.

This would be hilarious if it didn’t negatively impact all the sane people who aren’t in the cult.

JKCalhoun2• 20 days ago

Wait, how does the public benefit from the gains of Open AI with this scheme?

Traster• 21 days ago

Interesting. But if Sam really believes that the US public should share in the benefits of AI surely the number should be 50% not 5%.

oliver-rock2• 21 days ago

Why 50% and not 100%? The obvious answer is it creates strange incentives. Maybe something like 5% across the board for all large tech companies make sense?

ralferoo• 20 days ago

Or instead, they could just continue the simple route of taxing companies via corporation tax and dividend tax without having to worry about ownership at all.

logicalappeals• 21 days ago

Agreed. 5% seems like enough to throw a dog a bone, but not have enough skin in the game

cucumber37328422• 21 days ago

What's your basis for conflating government ownership with public benefit?

Seems to me like it creates a lot of perverse incentives.

reverius42• 20 days ago

I agree, I think we should go back to the old system of letting them be fully private and just taxing their gains heavily to pay for the public debts/needs.

exabrial3• 21 days ago

Taxes are theft. This is absurd.

There’s zero reason to bail these ding dongs out. Their entire business proposition has been to keep warm by incinerating fresh cash.

khalic2• 21 days ago

Taxes are theft

lol what a weird way to start this post

gordonhart• 21 days ago

Objectively it’s absurd to have an organization take a significant portion of your money on threat of imprisonment just to invest it in a corporation

triceratops5• 20 days ago

How is it a bailout if the government just takes 5% of the shares?

DANmode2• 20 days ago

The bailouts and or special treatment start afterward.

whalabi• 20 days ago

No, taxes are taxes and theft is theft.

Taxes are, in the case of a country like the United States, a legally sanctioned, representative approved (indirectly voter approved) means of supporting the needs of the nation/state as a whole.

Theft is distinguished from say, gifting money by consent. In a democracy mechanisms exist for our representatives to make decisions according to the consent of the people, to an extent.

You presumably live in a democracy so you presumably necessarily agree to abide by the laws of your nation which involve being governed by your democratically elected representatives.

exabrial3• 20 days ago

Right, I didn't approve my money taken away.

throwaw12• 21 days ago

Just a reminder: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/13lgbir/sam_altman...

petcat• 21 days ago

Altman has also reportedly spoken with the Democratic senator Bernie Sanders in recent weeks. The senator has been pushing for the creation of a sovereign wealth fund overseen by an independent commission and financed through a one-time 50% tax on the stock of the biggest AI companies.

Bernie shooting for the moon here

rickydroll• 21 days ago

The difference is that we can get to the moon

ProllyInfamous5• 21 days ago

I know OpenAI has delayed their IPO by a year (i.e. not publicly traded, yet; so: no dividends), but wouldn't it be better for the Government/bottom 95% if instead of taking ownership, they taxed all tech-related stocks 5% every time they're traded – this is a perpetual stream of income, and would likely reduce speculative short-term trading...

source: middle-aged electrician, owns a little stock (and would happily pay trading taxes, either in/out/both); know nothing unrelated to copper; eats crayons

glimshe2• 21 days ago

That's a terrifying idea that would destroy the tech stock market as we know it. We already have incentives in capital gain taxes to encourage longer term ownership.

Feel free to send a 5% donation to the government in your taxes every time you trade your tech stocks.

ProllyInfamous5• 21 days ago

This is an order of magnitude less than Bernie's 50% per-tech-trade tax (obviously impossible & bad), which he suggested as a means to fund the inevitable UBI [turns out former presidentical candiate Michael Yang wasn't wrong, just early, with his 2020 prediction].

Having never sold any stock on a short-term basis (i.e. I am a long-term value investor), I also disagree on the abysmally low tax rates I pay for long-term selling. To paraphrase the great Warren Buffet: the ultrarich should be taxed more and its unfair that the taxcodes don't require it.

----

Having spent the majority of my working life as a bluecollar electrician, I can assure that my wagie tax burden (as percentage of income) is much higher than most fellow employed-by-tech readers, here.

myrmidon• 21 days ago

An interesting proposition. Not sure if the outcome would be good, though; one result could be that "tech-related stocks" just stop being traded directly by bigger players, and people instead trade assets that hold such stocks (which reduces trade volume, and might result in the "trade tax" only being paid by small traders like you).

I find the concept of taxing stock trades in general interesting, but I believe it could have a bunch of undesirable side-effects.

Another really appealing tax suggestion IMO is the Zucman approach: You tax wealth at 2%, but deduct all the income tax from this. The motivation is that for the very wealthy, "nominal" taxable income is basically zero; and approach like this would take a fair cut from stock billionaires, while keeping things mostly unchanged for normal people.

Off-topic (asking as a foreigner): Does "eats crayons" imply a stint in the US Marines here, or can the phrase be used for non-military personnel, too?

ProllyInfamous5• 21 days ago

I find the concept of taxing stock trades in general interesting, but I believe it could have a bunch of undesirable side-effects.

My most-desired effect would be to reduce stocks that are traded (roundtrip: bought and sold) within MICROseconds. Even adding a 0.5% tax on all short-term holdings (i.e. less than a year held, within US) would effectively prevent non-human trading from occuring. I've worked in multiple datacenters in my career, and fibercable length can literally be a detectable factor/handicap [so exchanges e.g. make all cables the same length!].

Fun fact: 2025 was the first year that most publicly-traded stocks were transacted (officially) within darkpools (i.e. not sold on public exchanges, reducing the true effect of "price discovery").

----

I live in a workingclass neighborhood, and am bluecollar myself; most of my friends/family/clients are Top 5%ers... their failure at perspective is that crimes happen for reasons... and a major reason on my street is literally that single mothers are starving in order to feed their children. If a man is around, he's probably not the father, and is probably living as another child to both Momma and BigGov (certainly not working; with rare exception, the only men that work on my street live alone).

In a non-military sense, "eating crayons" is similar in compliment: it's a satyrical poke at self that one might be highly "regarded" == not wise in a traditional sense [" 'g'==>'t' "]. But seriously folks: don't eat crayons ("silver" tastes best and makes sparklypoo).

dhoe• 21 days ago

But governments cannot be trusted, better give it to an independent entity like they did with the Qatari jet

bilekas4• 21 days ago

This feels a bit off.. How is the government supposed to be able to regulate them impartially when they're literally invested in them.

What if a competitive startup startup starts to really take away from OpenAi's profits and then all of a sudden requires some approval for merger with Anthropic for example, I don't know if I would trust the government to be fair in their decision here.

Leaving aside the potential for letting the government(tax payers) hold the bag if there is a collapse.

simiones• 21 days ago

How is the government supposed to be able to regulate them impartially when they're literally invested in them.

That is exactly the point of this move, especially during the Trump administration.

larsnystrom• 21 days ago

I assume that’s why Altman wants the government as a co-owner.

amelius• 21 days ago

Everything seems rotten with this administration.

CodingJeebus• 20 days ago

Not to mention that a government ownership stake also incentivizes a bailout if this all goes bust.

cmrdporcupine3• 21 days ago

The Trump/Bessent/Lutnick grouping has no interest in regulating "impartially." Quite the opposite. That's the illusion of US capitalism 30 years ago.

Today's is explicitly more like Putin's Russia: the state has been captured by a series of private interests, one of whom is kingmaker, and you have to pay to play.

It's transactional and parasitical, not bureaucratic or regulatory. As long as the King and his friends get their cut your bridge can open, your new AI model can launch, or the US gov't will back up your crazy business with gov't debt.

It's not a stable system, but it's a system.

bilekas4• 20 days ago

I didn't mention specific politics because those are mutable. Sometimes good sometimes bad. What is in place today can change tomorrow, but holding 5% of a sketchy investment, it's a bit different. Having to bail them out.. It's another mess.

cucumber37328422• 21 days ago

This feels a bit off.. How is the government supposed to be able to regulate them impartially when they're literally invested in them.

Was the government impartial to begin with? Or were they stomping things and handing out favorable treatment based on the political whims of the minute?

Seems to me like "hey buddy you own some (but not too much) of this too so play the long game" provides somewhat of a counter incentive.

Will it work? Will it do the opposite and make things worse? Heck if I know.

rayiner2• 20 days ago

Wouldn’t the solution to that be for the government to also demand a 5% stake in every AI company? Along the lines of what Sanders wants to do?

downrightmike2• 20 days ago

We really need to go back to the 95% tax system on these giant corps

bilekas4• 20 days ago

"Demand". What kind of government would you like ?

Sanders doesn't want that actually.

Taxes are not investments in your company. They're your contribution to the infrastructure and people to help your company grow. In theory. The US seems to just let rich not pay.

senordevnyc• 20 days ago

You’re completely correct, of course, but I also think it’s worth remembering that the current regulatory environment is also made up of people, so the opportunity for corruption is already there. It does seem preferable to at least have the government putting its thumb on the scales to benefit the country at large, versus money under the table that benefits politicians and bureaucrats.

stouset• 20 days ago

This is quite literally government control of the means of production, which is the central tenet of the economic philosophy that the right repeatedly claims is their greatest mortal fear: socialism.

Sol-• 21 days ago

Seems to be a very bad mechanism to ensure democratic control of the technology. There must be better ways, even naively assuming that OpenAI is somehow genuine about wanting to broadly share its stake in the future.

chrisjj2• 21 days ago

Seems to be a very bad mechanism to ensure democratic control of the technology.

Think of it from the company's POV. As a very good mechanism to impede democratic control of the technology.

red-iron-pine2• 21 days ago

what about the behavior of the US government currently has you thinking it would be democratic?

oliver-rock2• 21 days ago

This is 9 years old. Shows that Sam Altman has been thinking about this for a while https://blog.samaltman.com/american-equity

ragebol4• 21 days ago

Discussed also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15789108.

ragebol4• 21 days ago

Besides direct control, what could a dividend on the profits do what a well-proportioned corporate tax on profits cannot do? The state would only get dividends assuming it would not sell shares.

And the state can exert control much more fairly (ie. to all competitors as well) with regulation and laws.

Regulations and taxes are seen as 'un-american' I suppose, while giving stock to the government is not somehow?

granzymes• 21 days ago

The proposal would also involve other US AI companies giving a similar stake to the government, the FT reported, although it is not clear yet whether companies such as Anthropic, Google and Meta would agree to the plan.

I can't see Google or Meta shareholders agreeing to this? That said, Google, Meta, and SpaceX are all still founder-controlled using supervoting shares.

nok22kon3• 21 days ago

the choice is progressively giving more of the company to the government, or the government taking it by force

it was long predicted that it is inevitable for national governments to fully nationalize AI labs and put them under military control

JKCalhoun2• 20 days ago

We have had for decades any number of defense contractors in the U.S. not taken by force by the U.S. They seem to have, nonetheless, happily produced what the military was wanting to purchase.

I'm not sure what's different here.

potsandpans3• 20 days ago

As far as I'm aware, this was only predicted by play acting effective altruists who tend to have a histrionic outlook around further developments of large language models.

bitmasher9• 21 days ago

In a proper capitalist society the government defines the rules of the market, aligned with the interests of several parties, and then companies compete within that well regulated and fair environment. The only incentive the government should have is to grow the entire market, so that they can collect more tax. There might be minor exceptions to protect key industries like food production or defense, but these should be a small as possible to ensure healthy competition.

It’s something entirely different when the government starts taking a stake in individual companies instead of the market as a whole. This can easily bias the government to pick OpenAI for certain contracts, or enact laws that benefit OpenAI more than its competitors. It reduces competition which hurts the overall economy, and it is an obvious vector for corruption which hurts the efficiency of the government.

It’s great if we can leverage AI to design the next great government system. A 5% stake feels more like a bribe to help push through some of these datacenter projects and enact friendly laws.

Eddy_Viscosity2• 21 days ago

This is a vision of 'proper' but certainly not the only one. Another version many of the very rich would like to see is given below.

In a proper capitalist society the capitalists define the rules of the market by competing to own the most politicians. The capitalists best at buying political influence get a larger say in what the rules will be so as to align them with their specific interests regardless of damage to others. When rules are aligned to your specific interests, this is called a well regulated and fair environment. Otherwise it is called a repressive nanny-state deep state swamp. The only incentive the government should have is to grow the politicians' personal wealth by bargaining with capitalists for which policies get enacted. There are no exceptions to protect key industries like food production. Defense spending is, however, in most capitalists interests as they often need the use of violent force to eliminate or subsume competition in other nations. Defense will therefore always receive robust funding.

CuriouslyC3• 21 days ago

AI was already too big to fail, this just locks it in. Talk about a trojan horse.

red-iron-pine2• 21 days ago

this will be a disaster

Havoc• 21 days ago

This smells like an incoming bailout

irthomasthomas• 21 days ago

This feels more communist than communist China. They typically take about 1% in Golden Shares that give them a board seat.

elil17• 21 days ago

It seems that the US may be in a process of signing itself up for many of the drawbacks of Chinese-style state capitalism (regulatory conflicts of interest, opportunities for politicians to rent-seek) with stakes small enough that the taxpayer will see little real economic benefit.

trymas• 20 days ago

This.

Though I’d say US is speeding with reimplementation of ruzzian style oligarchy (already happening with open corruption between government and broligarchs) with flavor of Chinese capitalism (this article).

nok22kon3• 21 days ago

soft nationalization

linguae• 21 days ago

I may be naïve or completely uninformed, but given the federal government’s vast resources, including supercomputers, national laboratories, the NSA, and many talented employees, why does the federal government need OpenAI or Anthropic for that matter when it has the resources to build its own LLM, even one exclusive for government use? The federal government has a long history of technical feats, such as the atomic bomb, the ARPANET, and the moon landing. Couldn’t it build its own state-of-the-art LLM?

SpicyLemonZest2• 21 days ago

Supercomputers aren't useful for training LLMs, and the best researchers would have politically infeasible pay requirements. I'm sure the government could acquire a bunch of GPUs and make it happen, if for some reason we had to, but it's easier to do outside of the government.

ethbr13• 20 days ago

I'm sure the government could acquire a bunch of GPUs and make it happen, if for some reason we had to, but it's easier to do outside of the government.

That would be the right way of doing this, if the government were interested.

Tax closed-model AI companies, buy Nvidia/AMD/Google hardware, build open-access datacenters, and offer access to academic labs with the caveat that resultant models must be open source.

rchaud2• 20 days ago

All of these examples are Cold War era or before, when defense and aerospace was a much more collectivist venture with far less private sector involvement.

After the Cold War, McKinsey and big 4 consultancies are working in every part of government, ostensibly to make government as efficient as the private sector. The NSA's surveillance program wouldn't have seen the light of day had Booz Allen not had a contract with them.

michaelsbradley2• 21 days ago

It would not be without problems and mistakes in execution over time, but I think the US and our NATO allies should nationalize AI research and development in a sweeping manner, and NATO membership ought be revised to hinge on that.

In the US, for example, all intellectual property of OpenAI, Anthropic, et al. would become public domain through custody of the Federal government, probably in an expansion of the NSF. All AI research and development would be required by law to be done in the open: open source code, transparent training data, reproducible models.

throw12345678914• 20 days ago

Oh, you have NATO allies now? And in the future what… “we leave NATO if you don’t buy enough “tokens”? Go and build a wall.

michaelsbradley2• 19 days ago

Donald won’t be POTUS too much longer, hang in there, less than 3 years to go.

yde_java• 21 days ago

With the USA and Israel tightening their intelligence agencies / secret service exchange, and now pulling in OpenAI -- that's a very effective strategy to exercise more worldly dominance

I_am_tiberius2• 21 days ago

Some advantages this gives OpenAI:

- Altman takes away Musk's power as Trump's favourite tech friend.

- the government won't punish OpenAI too hard, because it makes money when OpenAI does well.

- the government can look at the user's data without any problems.

- OpenAI's competitors are forced to give the government a share in their companies too.

- when OpenAI sells shares to the public, investors will trust it more because the government is involved.

- every American could get a yearly check from OpenAI's profits, so voters will protect OpenAI.

- Sam Altman becomes friends with politicians from all sides, so nobody dares to investigate him.

bushido• 21 days ago

Not a great move imo from a business stand point, given the heightened supply chain risk that global (non-US) corporations and sovereigns are already associating with the frontier labs.

I like that it's going to drive more momentum towards the open source/weight models. I was hoping that it would be a slower burn though.

AJRF• 21 days ago

I sound conspiratorial - but everything happening in the US around AI + Crypto has the fingerprints of David Sacks and Theil on it. You can hear them talk about these things and then they happen.

Sacks has talked extensively about the US government having stakes in tech companies for months and months on the All In pod.

It seems like saw Russian Oligarchs and instead of being morally repulsed they thought "hmm that is quite nice, I would like that"

I_am_tiberius2• 20 days ago

Russian Oligarchy is actually the best comparison there is.

fuzzfactor• 20 days ago

There's a huge difference between being shaken down highway robbery style "versus" pre-emptively paying the toll in advance for safe passage.

I guess.

It may not be obvious but isn't one unethical and the other not so much?

For some operators they may highly prefer circumstances where it's impossible to tell the difference though.

throw12345678914• 20 days ago

It seems like saw Russian Oligarchs and instead of being morally repulsed they thought "hmm that is quite nice, I would like that"

Trump was saying that for years. He admires Putin. And you guys have still elected him.

cdrnsf2• 20 days ago

How much is a 5% stake in a money pit really worth?

throw12345678914• 20 days ago

Zero until they turn a profit.

cdrnsf2• 20 days ago

Until or, better yet, if.

freakynit• 20 days ago

We may not see it yet, but, this is a way to capture government and use that to suppress competition and any dissent.

The moment the government owns equity, every regulatory decision becomes conflicted. The top 3-4 AI companies in whic the givernment owns equity, will become too politically entangled to fail or to let fail or be meaningfully competed against, or "allowed" to be competed against.

This will also lead to drasitc increase in surveillance state since givernment will now have a fudiciary, and "political" duty to increase dividends, "for citizens". One way to do that will be to purchase large amounts of surveillance equipment and tech disguised as "safety".

Any public dissent can now be indirectly suppressed by threatening with a perceived decrease in dividends or value of the sovereign wealth fund, thus, affecting healthcare, and other public expenditure.

This also sets a very bad precedent for other governments to follow. This will end up with givernments of major nations to act in similar fashion, thus, expanding this dystopian setup further.

tencentshill• 20 days ago

Good. Maybe this will incentivize a push to make the regulatory agencies truly independent, like the fed. the executive branch is clearly not up to the task.

pseudalopex• 20 days ago

The Supreme Court this week announced they would not allow independent regulatory agencies but the Federal Reserve.

wilkommen• 20 days ago

This is just a way to keep the AI bubble going. The American people will not benefit from having a "stake" in AI companies. Doing so will serve only to expand the amount of capital available to AI companies for them to waste on a technology that will never live up to expectations. The US govt taking a "stake" in OpenAI and its competitors will only grant those organizations more power to further misallocate the nation's capital for their own enrichment. Instead of taking a stake, the US govt should use copyright and antitrust law to dismantle these companies and their backers in big tech, and shut this wasteful Ponzi scheme down, so that AI can find a role in the economy that suits its actual capabilities.

bit-anarchist2• 20 days ago

Sad, but I'm unsurprised by this. Is it just me, or USA (or most modern governments) seem to be trying to copy China's economic and governmental model? Specially conservatives. I get the impression they are jealous of the PRC.

OpenAI ‘in early talks to give 5% stake to US government’

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