😺 Trump wants a piece of AI
The Neuron · Grant Harvey · 2026-06-18
The Neuron newsletter reports that Trump administration officials discussed taking government equity stakes in major AI companies via sovereign wealth funds or Trump Accounts, while Dario Amodei and Demis Hassabis advocated for a U.S.-led AI coalition at the G7 as fallout from the Fable 5 model shutdown continues.
Appears in
Extraction
Topics: ai-policygovernment-ai-investmentai-governanceg7-summit
Claims
- Senior Trump administration officials discussed taking government equity stakes in major AI companies, with Treasury Secretary Bessent favoring AI equity for Trump Accounts and Commerce Secretary Lutnick preferring a sovereign wealth fund.
- Dario Amodei and Demis Hassabis advocated at the G7 for a U.S.-led coalition to govern AI rules, chip access, model access, and safety standards.
- Frontier AI is increasingly being treated by Washington as strategic infrastructure rather than software, with the government seeking safety controls, leverage, and economic upside.
- The Fable 5 shutdown demonstrated the fragility of user dependency on frontier AI tools that can be revoked with little notice.
- Microsoft and Meta have shown little interest in government equity proposals, and the plan remains a difficult sell beyond OpenAI.
Key quotes
Washington is moving from regulating AI companies to negotiating leverage over them.
frontier AI is being treated less like software and more like strategic infrastructure. The government wants safety, leverage, and economic upside.
open source AI development remains untouched, as this little episode showed it is more important than ever that we have access to open research and models you can run on your own servers