Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has proposed giving the U.S. government a 5 percent stake in OpenAI, worth roughly $42.6 billion at the company's $852 billion valuation from its March funding round, according to the Financial Times. Altman raised the idea in conversations with President Donald Trump, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, though the talks are described as conceptual and early-stage, and any deal of this size would likely require an act of Congress. Altman wants every major American AI developer, including Google, Meta and Anthropic, to hand over a similar 5 percent slice into a shared vehicle styled after the Alaska Permanent Fund; none of those companies have agreed. The White House has already normalized the idea of government as shareholder, converting CHIPS Act grants into a 9.9 percent stake in Intel last August and extracting a 15 percent cut of China chip sales from Nvidia and AMD. Trump has said AI wealth-sharing "almost becomes a partnership with the American public" and that "it would make 'em rich." Altman has also been talking to Senator Bernie Sanders, who has pushed a one-time 50 percent tax on AI company stock under the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act.