One of the world's most valuable private companies has raised an unusual idea: making the government a shareholder. OpenAI has proposed giving the United States a stake of around 5 percent, according to reports — a plan that remains preliminary but that would tie the public directly to the fortunes of the artificial-intelligence firm behind ChatGPT.
The proposal
The idea, first reported by the Financial Times and picked up by Bloomberg and CNBC, would see Washington take a roughly 5 percent holding in the company. At OpenAI's most recent valuation of about $852 billion — reached in a record funding round earlier this year — that share would be worth on the order of $40 billion.
OpenAI's chief executive, Sam Altman, has framed such a move as a way to spread the benefits of AI, arguing that giving the public a financial interest in the technology is the best way to share in its potential gains. The concept has been floated as part of a broader notion of a "public wealth fund" that would hold stakes in leading American AI companies and channel returns to citizens.
Why now
The proposal arrives amid intensifying political attention on AI and on OpenAI specifically, and reports describe it in part as an effort to ease pressure in Washington. OpenAI has extensive dealings with the US government and its priorities — on chips, data centers and the broader race to lead in AI — and questions about how the enormous wealth being created should be shared have become a live political issue.
It also follows a major change in OpenAI's structure. Long organized around a nonprofit, the company restructured in 2025 so that its for-profit arm became a public-benefit corporation — a shift that, for the first time, made conventional equity ownership of the business more straightforward. That change is what makes handing over a defined stake even conceivable.
A long way from done
Crucially, this is a proposal, not an agreement. The reports describe early-stage discussions, and significant questions remain unanswered: exactly how any stake would be transferred, how it would be governed, how returns might be distributed, and whether other AI companies would take part in a wider scheme. It is also unclear how the US government would formally respond. As of the reporting, no terms had been settled and no deal had been struck.
The bigger questions
Even as an idea, the proposal touches deep and contested questions. Supporters of public stakes in AI argue that if the technology generates extraordinary wealth — and, potentially, disruption to jobs — the public should share in the upside rather than watch the gains accrue to a handful of firms and investors. Skeptics warn that government ownership of a company it also regulates could create conflicts of interest, blur the line between the state and private enterprise, and raise thorny questions about control and favoritism.
For now, those debates are hypothetical. But that OpenAI is even discussing giving away a slice of one of the most valuable companies on earth is a measure of how large the stakes around AI — financial and political — have become.
