OpenAI is reportedly considering one of the most unusual ideas in the AI industry so far, giving the US government a 5% stake in the company. The proposal is described as early discussion, not a final deal, reports the Financial Times. Based on OpenAI’s reported $852 billion valuation, a 5% holding would be worth about $42.6 billion, which would make it an unusually large public position in a private technology company.
The discussions appear to be tied to OpenAI’s effort to manage growing political pressure in Washington. According to the report, Sam Altman has argued that giving the public a financial interest in the company could be a way to share the benefits of AI more broadly and also reduce the backlash against a small number of firms becoming extremely rich and powerful from AI systems. The idea is not being presented as a bailout or rescue package. Instead, it is closer to a public wealth-sharing arrangement, where the government would own part of the upside of a company that could become one of the biggest player of the AI era.
The report also suggest that the idea was not limited to OpenAI alone as a broader version of the plan would involve other leading US AI companies potentially contributing similar minority stakes, though there is no sign that those companies have agreed to such an arrangement.
The timing of the proposal matters because the relationship between AI labs and Washington has become much more tense. Frontier AI companies are facing pressure over job losses, concentration of wealth, cyber risks, misinformation, national security, and the huge data-center and power buildout needed to train advanced models. The Trump administration has already been more active in advanced-model oversight, including delaying OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 release and restricting access to Anthropic’s top models on national-security grounds before some of those restrictions were later eased. In that environment, a government stake could be seen as a way for OpenAI to turn the state from a pure regulator into a financial stakeholder in the success of the AI sector.
Another key point is that the proposal seems linked to OpenAI’s future corporate plans. As OpenAI is preparing for a public listing, reducing political risk becomes extremely important. A company worth more than $800 billion would want a stable relationship with the government on issues like model releases, export controls, procurement, energy access, and infrastructure approvals.
However, many key details of the proposed deal are still not public, and nothing has been confirmed yet. It is unclear whether the stake would carry voting rights or be non-voting, whether it would be held directly by the US government or through a public fund, and whether existing investors would face dilution. It is also not known whether the public would receive any direct financial benefit — like dividends, or whether the government would simply hold the shares as a strategic asset.
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Ashutosh is a Senior Writer at The Tech Portal, largely reporting on new tech, and intersection of technology and business. Ashutosh’s career spans across nearly a decade of technology writing across multiple platforms and languages.
