OpenAI reportedly offers Washington $42.6bn stake

OpenAI has reportedly offered the U.S. government a 5% equity stake in the company, a move that could be valued at roughly $42.6 billion based on the firm’s latest $852 billion valuation from its record-breaking March funding round. The proposal, first reported by the Financial Times, signals that negotiations between the White House and one of Silicon Valley’s most valuable startups are intensifying after more than a year of discussions.

According to two sources familiar with the talks, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has argued that giving the public a financial interest in the company is the most effective way to distribute the economic benefits of artificial intelligence. This position aligns with OpenAI’s public messaging since early this year, when Altman initially floated the idea of a government stake directly to the Trump administration.

The structure under consideration reportedly involves a public wealth fund, a concept OpenAI first outlined in an April policy paper. That document proposed pooling equity donations from AI companies and distributing the resulting returns to citizens. Under this framework, OpenAI would donate shares rather than sell them, avoiding a direct cash outlay from the government and sidestepping, at least in principle, questions about how a private company transfers equity to the federal government.

The FT report suggests the arrangement could also involve other major U. S. AI firms, including Anthropic, Google, and Meta, contributing similar stakes through the same vehicle. However, it remains unclear whether any of these companies would agree to OpenAI’s terms, and none have publicly commented on the proposal.

The political landscape around the idea is more contentious than the mechanics. Senator Bernie Sanders has introduced a competing and far more aggressive plan, the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, which would impose a one-time 50% stock tax on large AI companies to seed a fund his office projects could reach $7 trillion. Palantir’s Alex Karp has argued that OpenAI’s voluntary 5% offer will appear modest next to Sanders’ proposal, and that full nationalization of frontier AI companies is inevitable regardless of which version wins first.

Both plans share a common premise: that a small number of AI companies are poised to become extraordinarily valuable, and the public should have a claim on that wealth before it fully accrues to private shareholders. The divergence lies in consent and scale. OpenAI is offering a small slice voluntarily, structured to resemble a donation, while Sanders wants a mandatory transfer worth ten times as much, paid in stock rather than cash and backed by legislative threat rather than corporate initiative.

OpenAI’s ownership structure already complicates any transfer of this kind. The company completed a recapitalization last year that split it into a nonprofit foundation and a for-profit public benefit corporation, with the foundation retaining a 26% stake and legal control over the business. Layering a government-held 5% stake on top of that would require decisions about where the new shares sit, what voting rights attach to them, and whether the foundation’s existing control provisions would need renegotiating to accommodate a politically sensitive shareholder.

None of this resolves the practical questions that have stalled the idea for over a year. How a private company transfers equity to the Treasury, who administers the resulting fund, and whether Congress would need to authorize such a vehicle all remain unsettled. OpenAI’s own restructuring into a public benefit corporation under nonprofit oversight further complicates the ownership picture.

The FT’s sources gave no timeline for when, or whether, the proposal will move from talking point to signed agreement. Neither the White House nor OpenAI had confirmed the specific terms on the record at the time of the report.