OpenAI is said to have proposed a 5% stake valued at $42.6 billion to Washington.

      According to the Financial Times, OpenAI has proposed giving the US government a 5% equity stake in the company, as discussions between the White House and the well-funded Silicon Valley startup approach a resolution after more than a year of negotiation. At OpenAI's valuation of $852 billion, established during its record-setting funding round in March, a 5% stake would equate to approximately $42.6 billion.

      Two sources informed the FT that CEO Sam Altman has suggested that providing the public with a financial interest in OpenAI is the best way to share the benefits of artificial intelligence. This perspective aligns with OpenAI’s public statements since early this year when Altman first introduced the concept of a government stake to the Trump administration.

      The arrangement under consideration reportedly consists of a public wealth fund, a concept OpenAI first detailed in an April policy paper that proposed pooling equity contributions from AI firms and distributing the resulting economic gains to citizens. In this model, OpenAI would donate shares instead of selling them, thus avoiding a direct cash payment from the government and, at least theoretically, bypassing questions about how a private company allocates equity to the federal government.

      The FT's report also indicates that the proposed plan aims for other US AI companies to relinquish comparable stakes through the same mechanism. Companies like Anthropic, Google, and Meta were mentioned as potential participants, but it remains uncertain whether any of them would agree to OpenAI's proposal, and none have publicly commented on it.

      The political landscape surrounding the idea is more complicated than its mechanics. Senator Bernie Sanders has advocated for a competing and significantly more aggressive initiative, the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, which would impose a one-time 50% stock tax on large AI companies to establish a fund projected by his office to reach $7 trillion.

      Alex Karp of Palantir has claimed that OpenAI's voluntary 5% offer will seem modest compared to Sanders’ proposal and that full nationalization of leading AI companies is inevitable, regardless of which plan prevails first.

      Both proposals share a common foundational belief that a select group of AI companies are poised to grow extraordinarily large and that the public should have some claim to that value before it fully benefits private shareholders. However, they differ in terms of consent and scale. OpenAI is offering a small voluntary stake that resembles a donation, while Sanders is advocating for a mandatory transfer worth ten times as much, to be paid in stock rather than cash and supported by the threat of legislation.

      OpenAI's ownership structure already complicates such a transfer. The company underwent a recapitalization last year that divided it into a nonprofit foundation and a for-profit public benefit corporation, with the foundation holding a 26% stake and legal control over the operation. Adding a government-held 5% stake to this structure would necessitate decisions regarding the positioning of the new shares, the voting rights associated with them, and whether the foundation's existing control provisions would require re-negotiation to accommodate a new, politically sensitive shareholder.

      These considerations do not resolve the practical challenges that have delayed the proposal for over a year, including how a private company would transfer equity to the Treasury, who would manage the resulting fund, and whether Congress would need to authorize such a mechanism. OpenAI's restructuring into a public benefit corporation under nonprofit oversight already significantly complicates the ownership situation.

      The FT’s sources did not provide a timeline for when, or if, the proposal will advance from discussion to a formal agreement, and neither the White House nor OpenAI has publicly confirmed the specific terms mentioned in the report.