By Stuart Kerr, Technology Correspondent, LiveAIWire

Sam Altman has personally pitched President Trump, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on handing the US government a 5 percent equity stake in OpenAI, worth roughly 42.6 billion dollars at the company’s 852 billion dollar valuation from its March 2026 funding round. The OpenAI government stake proposal, first reported by the Financial Times on July 2, is not a one-off gesture. Altman’s broader pitch is that every leading US AI developer, potentially Google, Meta, and Anthropic among them, would contribute a matching 5 percent slice of equity into a public fund modeled explicitly on the Alaska Permanent Fund, the sovereign wealth vehicle that has paid Alaskan residents an annual oil-revenue dividend every year since 1982.

Altman has been building toward this for over a year. He first floated the concept of a government stake to the administration in early 2025, according to CNBC’s reporting on the talks. In April 2026, OpenAI published a policy paper proposing a “Public Wealth Fund” that would give “every citizen, including those not invested in financial markets, a stake in AI-driven economic growth.” In May, the OpenAI Foundation, the company’s nonprofit arm, argued that society will likely need “new approaches that give people durable stakes in the systems creating value.” The equity pitch to Trump’s inner circle is the mechanism that turns that language into an actual transaction.

Why the Alaska Comparison Matters

Alaska created its Permanent Fund in 1976 to convert a finite oil windfall into a lasting income stream, seeding it with a share of state oil revenue rather than general tax dollars. The fund now holds roughly 91 billion dollars and paid every eligible Alaskan a dividend last year of 1,000 dollars. Altman’s substitution is direct: swap oil for AI compute and model access, and let a public vehicle capture a slice of the returns instead of letting them accrue entirely to private shareholders. Forbes contributor and public finance writer James Broughel has noted that at Alaska’s payout rate of roughly 5 percent of fund value annually, OpenAI’s stake alone could support close to 2 billion dollars a year in distributions once realized, with the total climbing substantially if other frontier labs joined in.

The mechanics differ from the government’s most recent comparable deal. In August 2025, the Trump administration took a 9.9 percent stake in Intel through an 8.9 billion dollar investment funded by remaining CHIPS Act grants, an actual cash purchase. AMD and Nvidia separately agreed to hand over 15 percent of their China chip revenue in exchange for export licenses, a revenue-sharing arrangement tied to a specific regulatory approval. Altman’s OpenAI government stake proposal is structurally different from both: it is equity offered without the government paying anything for it, a voluntary transfer rather than a purchase or a licensing condition.

Who Else Would Actually Join

The plan’s biggest open question is whether anyone follows OpenAI’s lead. None of Google, Meta, or Anthropic has said or signaled it would hand over 5 percent of its equity, and a Reuters source reported that the administration and Anthropic have not even discussed the idea. Anthropic has floated a different mechanism entirely, with chief executive Dario Amodei writing that “universal basic income could be financed through taxes on relevant companies” rather than direct equity transfer. Elon Musk, whose xAI would presumably also be asked to participate, has instead called for “universal high income via checks issued by the Federal government” as the right response to AI-driven job losses.

Trump himself has signaled support for the general direction without committing to specifics. “If we do that, the public will become very rich,” he told reporters last month, according to reporting cited by the Financial Times. Vice President JD Vance has said the president prefers equity arrangements over direct cash payouts. Whether that preference translates into a formal government policy, congressional legislation, or simply remains a voluntary offer from one company is still unresolved as of this writing.

The Sanders Counter-Proposal Makes Altman’s Offer Look Small

Senator Bernie Sanders has pushed for something far more aggressive than what OpenAI is offering. His American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, previewed in Senate floor remarks and detailed in a June 18 release, would impose what he calls a one-time 50 percent tax on the largest AI companies, payable in stock rather than cash, covering OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and the AI-specific divisions of Amazon, Google, and Microsoft above a 200 million dollar annual AI-revenue threshold. Sanders estimates the resulting fund could reach nearly 7 trillion dollars, paying out a 5 percent annual dividend directly to Americans and giving the federal government board seats and voting shares in every covered company.

Sanders has met directly with Altman and the two remain far apart. “I think people like Sam Altman and Trump are saying, okay, look, we’re making zillions of dollars so we’re going to be nice guys and maybe we’ll buy off the public. We will give 5 percent of our profits back into the government,” Sanders said in an interview. “That’s not what we’re talking about. What we’re talking about are two very different things.” His own bill has no co-sponsors and, by his own admission, stands almost no chance in a Republican-controlled Congress. Legal scholars including George Mason University’s Ilya Somin have also argued that a mandatory 50 percent transfer would likely violate the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause, since calling a forced stock transfer a tax does not change what it functionally is.

What This Means for You

If OpenAI’s voluntary 5 percent offer becomes the template other labs eventually follow, the practical effect for ordinary Americans would be modest in the near term. A payout modeled on Alaska’s structure would depend on OpenAI’s valuation holding or growing, on the fund actually being established with real distribution rules, and on other labs choosing to participate rather than watching one company absorb the political credit while keeping 95 percent of the upside. None of that is resolved. What is already happening is a shift in how AI companies talk about their own wealth: both OpenAI and Anthropic are now publicly conceding, in different ways, that the public has some legitimate claim on AI-generated returns, a concession that would have been unthinkable in the industry even two years ago.

The proposal also lands at a specific moment for OpenAI, days after the company delayed the full public launch of GPT-5.6 at the administration’s request under a new voluntary pre-release review framework. Understanding this equity pitch alongside what OpenAI’s 852 billion dollar valuation actually reflects and the wider AI IPO wave OpenAI is racing toward makes the timing clearer: a company preparing to answer to public shareholders is also, simultaneously, trying to get ahead of a political backlash before it arrives at the ballot box. That instinct, getting ahead of Washington rather than reacting to it, is the same one that shaped Anthropic’s recent standoff with the Commerce Department, a reminder that no frontier AI lab currently operates outside the reach of a government that has already shown it can reshape the industry’s terms on short notice.

About the Author

Stuart Kerr is Technology Correspondent at LiveAIWire, covering artificial intelligence, emerging technology, and their impact on business, society, and everyday life. LiveAIWire publishes original AI journalism every weekday at liveaiwire.com.