OpenAI proposes handing over 5% stake to Trump administration, says Financial Times

OpenAI logo on a cell phone in front of an image generated by DALL·E, ChatGPT's image creation tool.
Michael Dwyer/AP
OpenAI discussed the possibility of granting the United States government a 5% stake, the Financial Times reported this Thursday (2).
For the proposal, OpenAI suggested that other American AI companies also hand over similar stakes to the government, according to the newspaper. It is not yet clear whether other companies would accept.
Reuters was unable to immediately verify the information. OpenAI and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Last month, President Donald Trump said he was evaluating options for giving the public a stake in leading AI companies, in response to concerns that American citizens would not benefit from the industry's expected profits.
Prior to that, OpenAI had proposed creating a "public wealth fund" to invest in AI companies and distribute the proceeds to citizens. Anthropic, in turn, said it was studying a "digital dividend", defined as payments to Americans financed by taxes on the AI sector.
Now on g1
How the proposal would work
The FT said, citing two people familiar with the conversations, that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and company executives suggested that the main American AI companies allocate 5% of their capital to a vehicle similar to the Alaska Permanent Fund, a state-owned company created with oil revenues, which pays annual dividends to residents and helps finance Alaska's budget.
According to the newspaper, Altman discussed the stake sale with Trump, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. He has also spoken in recent weeks with Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders.
The report comes after OpenAI last week postponed the full public release of GPT-5.6 at the request of the US government. The announcement came after the American government ordered rival Anthropic to suspend foreign access to its frontier AI models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, due to risks to national security.
Both OpenAI and Anthropic have confidentially filed requests to go public in the United States.

Source: G1