OpenAI pitches Trump a 5% stake to ward off regulation and share AI wealth

OpenAI has proposed ceding a 5 percent ownership stake to the U.S. government as part of a broader strategy to ease tensions with the Trump administration and defuse criticism about AI's concentration of power, according to reporting from the Financial Times.

The proposal and its value#

CEO Sam Altman has framed a government ownership interest as a mechanism for the public to benefit from AI's economic upside. Based on OpenAI's recent $852 billion valuation, a 5 percent stake would be worth approximately $42.6 billion. Altman reportedly first broached this concept with Trump administration officials in early 2025.

The discussions remain preliminary, and the idea contemplates expanding beyond OpenAI—other major U.S. AI firms would presumably offer comparable stakes if the deal moves forward. Whether those companies would accept such terms remains uncertain.

Strategic context: regulation and competitive pressure#

The proposal arrives as the Trump administration has taken an unusually aggressive role in AI oversight. Anthropic, OpenAI's principal competitor, has faced repeated regulatory obstacles, including a Pentagon designation as a supply chain risk and unexpected export controls that forced the company to pull its latest models from the market. These actions have unsettled the industry about future government intervention.

Broader government interest in AI wealth capture#

The White House has shown growing appetite for using policy tools to claim a slice of AI's windfall. Under Trump, the government already holds a 10 percent stake in Intel and has reportedly demanded Nvidia and AMD dedicate 15 percent of their China-related AI chip revenues to federal coffers. Lawmakers including Bernie Sanders have gone further, proposing a 50 percent one-time tax on AI company stock to fund a sovereign wealth fund, arguing that AI represents a shared public resource.