Uncle Sam Goes Long on AI: White House Eyes Equity in OpenAI and xAI
“Forty years of free market sermons, one trillion dollar asset class, and suddenly Washington wants carry.”
Sally's not done with you yet.
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Sally's Take
There is a special kind of comedy in watching the loudest champions of the free market discover state capitalism at the exact moment the asset class gets big enough to matter. For decades, a government taking ownership stakes in private companies was what other countries did, the sad ones with five year plans and bread lines. Then artificial intelligence started printing valuations with twelve zeros, and on June 6, President Trump told reporters the US government may take direct equity stakes in AI giants like OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI. "You make them a partnership in this revolution," he said, which is a sentence that would have gotten you escorted out of a Reagan era cabinet meeting. Principles, it turns out, come with a market cap threshold, and AI just cleared it.
The mechanism is even better than the headline. Under the framework being discussed, OpenAI would not sell shares to the government. It would donate them, seeding something called a Public Wealth Fund, a sovereign investment vehicle that OpenAI itself proposed in an April 2026 policy paper. Read that again. The company being regulated drafted the structure through which the regulator becomes a shareholder. Sam Altman first pitched the concept to the administration in early 2025 and revisited it in Washington this week, while AI regulation conveniently sat on the same table. This is not regulatory capture. This is regulatory adoption, complete with the paperwork. When your potential overseer holds your equity, every future rule arrives with a conflict of interest baked directly into the cap table.
And the political horseshoe has fully closed. Bernie Sanders wants the government to take 50 percent stakes in the big three labs plus a 50 percent tax on their stock, and the populist right is suddenly nodding along, just with friendlier branding and fewer apologies. Meanwhile Anthropic is reportedly not in the equity conversation at all, months after federal agencies were ordered to stop using its technology, which tells you exactly how selective this partnership is. Whatever this is, it is not a market anymore. It is a court, where proximity to the throne determines whose equity counts as patriotic. The companies that spent years lobbying against government interference are now competing to hand the government a stake. Ideology lost. The deal flow won.
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What Actually Happened
- •On June 6, 2026, President Trump told reporters the US government may take direct equity stakes in AI giants like OpenAI and xAI, saying "You make them a partnership in this revolution."
- •The proposed mechanism: OpenAI donates shares to seed a "Public Wealth Fund," a sovereign vehicle OpenAI itself outlined in an April 2026 policy proposal. The regulated company wrote the regulator's term sheet.
- •Sam Altman first pitched the concept to the administration in early 2025 and revisited it in Washington the same week, conveniently while AI regulation was on the table.
- •Bernie Sanders wants 50 percent government stakes in OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI plus a 50 percent tax on their stock, meaning the left and the populist right now agree on owning the robots.
- •Anthropic is reportedly not in equity talks at all, months after federal agencies were ordered to stop using its technology. Loyalty, it turns out, has a cap table.
Who Got Burned
Free market purists, mostly, who spent decades insisting the government should never pick winners and are now watching it pick shareholders instead. Anthropic gets singed twice, first frozen out of federal contracts and now left off the partnership guest list while its rivals negotiate sovereign blessings. Smaller AI labs get burned by implication, because once the state holds equity in your competitors, the playing field is not level, it is tilted and notarized. And taxpayers should keep a hand on their wallets, because a donated stake sounds free right up until the conflicts of interest start writing policy.
Silver Lining
Underneath the cynicism sits a genuinely serious question that deserved a public debate and is finally getting one: if AI generates the kind of wealth its builders keep promising, who captures the upside? Public equity is at least an honest mechanism for sharing returns, far more honest than pretending trickle down economics will handle it. If a sovereign stake comes with real transparency requirements, public reporting and accountability for safety practices, it could give citizens an actual claim on the technology reshaping their jobs. The idea is not crazy. The execution just needs to be designed by people who do not hold the pen and the shares at the same time.
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