OpenAI has proposed handing the US government a 5% stake in the company, the Financial Times reported on Thursday, as the artificial intelligence startup seeks to defuse growing political pressure in Washington.
A 5% stake would be worth about $42.6 billion, after the AI lab closed a record-breaking funding round in March at a post-money valuation of $852 billion.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman argued that giving the public a financial stake in the company is the best way to share the benefits of AI, the Financial Times reported, citing two people familiar with the conversations.
Altman suggested a stake of that size in early talks with the Trump administration, as part of a broader deal under which Washington would hold 5% of each of the top US AI developers through a government vehicle, according to the report.
The proposed agreement provides that other American artificial intelligence companies, such as Anthropic, Google and Goalceding similar stakes to the government through a sovereign fund vehicle, the Financial Times said. It is unclear whether any of these groups would agree to OpenAI’s proposal.
The White House, OpenAI, Google and Meta did not respond to CNBC’s requests for comment.
The Trump administration and Anthropic have not discussed the government taking stakes in the company, a source familiar with the matter said Thursday.
Pressure on major American AI companies has increased as Washington becomes increasingly wary of cybersecurity vulnerabilities associated with their models and growing competition from open source Chinese models that are proving to be almost as capable and significantly cheaper than some leading American models.
Anthropic had disabled access to its most advanced Mythos and Fable models last month to comply with a government export control directive. On Tuesday, the company behind the Claude AI platform said it had been authorized to restore access to the models after taking steps to resolve policymakers’ security concerns.
The reported launch of OpenAI came after more than a year of talks about possible government involvement in the company, CNBC reported last month, with Altman first pitching the concept directly to the Trump administration in early 2025.
In April, the leading model maker proposed creating a “public wealth fund” to hold assets that capture the growth of AI companies and distribute the economic benefits to the public.
The Trump administration has previously acquired stakes in private companies, investing in Intel Corp., IBMand other critical and quantum minerals companies during the president’s second term.
The government took a 10% stake in Intel after a historic $8.9 billion investment in the chipmaker’s common stock in August last year. In May, President Donald Trump said he should have asked for a larger stake in the company.
Trump has described the United States taking a stake in AI giants as “a beautiful thing” that would make Americans “partners in this revolution.”
— CNBC’s Ashley Capoot contributed to this report.
