FT: OpenAI has proposed giving Washington 5% of its $852B business to ease AI pressure.
Rohan Paul Twitter · Rohan Paul (@rohanpaul_ai) · 2026-07-02
OpenAI has proposed giving the U.S. government a 5% stake in its $852 billion business as a public wealth fund modeled on Alaska's oil fund, aiming to distribute AI economic gains and ease regulatory pressure, though no deal exists and major legal and shareholder hurdles remain.
Appears in
Extraction
Topics: ai-policyopenai-governancepublic-wealth-fundai-regulation
Claims
- OpenAI has proposed giving the U.S. government a 5% stake in its $852 billion business, structured as a public wealth fund that distributes AI economic gains to citizens.
- OpenAI also wants Anthropic, Google, Meta, and other major AI companies to contribute similar 5% stakes, but none have agreed.
- The legal pathway for such a deal is unclear and would likely require Congressional action to create a formal public fund.
- A new 5% stake would dilute existing shareholders — OpenAI Foundation (26%), Microsoft (27%), and employees/investors (47%) — unless shares come from an existing holder.
- Non-voting shares in a public wealth fund would be the cleanest structure, since voting shares would make the government both regulator and part-owner.
Key quotes
The idea borrows from Alaska's oil fund, which shares resource wealth with residents. Here, the resource is not oil, but future income from advanced AI systems.
The cleanest path would be non-voting shares placed in a public wealth fund, so the government gets upside but not control. The messiest path would be voting shares, because then Washington becomes both regulator and part-owner.
OpenAI has already proposed a public wealth fund giving citizens AI-linked financial upside.