The idea is so unusual that it took a moment to register: the US government, which owns a portion of the companies building cutting-edge AI.
According to a NOTUS report, senior US officials have held preliminary talks with leading AI companies about exactly that: the federal government acquiring shares in the core companies of the technology it is also trying to regulate.
The thread goes through OpenAI. Sam Altman, the company’s CEO, who has spent recent weeks in Washington urging Congress to fund AI testing instead of requiring model approvalshas periodically discussed the staking concept with senior Trump administration officials since the president’s second term began, NOTUS reported, after first raising it directly with Donald Trump in early 2025 and raising it again with officials in recent weeks.
Discussions, according to the report, have focused on companies voluntarily giving up shares to the government rather than the government purchasing them.
What the government would do with the returns is part of the discourse. One discussed option is to direct revenue to public purposes, including a dividend paid to all American households, a framework that turns government ownership of AI into a mechanism for distributing profits from the technology directly to citizens.
It’s a politically potent idea at a time when, according to the survey cited by NOTUS, 55% of Americans believe that AI will do more harm than good in their daily lives, and when OpenAI’s own corporate structure is already under the microscope through the Musk v. trial Altman for its conversion from nonprofit to for-profit.
That public skepticism is the context to which companies are reacting. Tech companies are looking for ways to win over Americans who are wary of AI, and a structure that gives the public a stake, literal or financial, on the upside is a response to the charge that profits are flowing to a few. From that point of view, voluntarily giving up shares means both reputation management and tax policy.
The objection is structural and immediate. A government that owns shares in a company it also regulates is both a shareholder and an arbitrator, a conflict that critics cited in the report immediately pointed out. The incentive to protect the value of a holding sits uncomfortably next to the duty to monitor the company that owns it, and no amount of public dividend framework fully resolves the tension.
The idea also has little support across the political spectrum. Versions of public equity in AI have also been raised from the left, with the logic that if the technology displaces large numbers of workers, the public should be entitled to the resulting profits rather than seeing them accrue entirely in the hands of private shareholders, a concern that OpenAI itself has expressed even as Altman downplays the idea of an AI job apocalypse.
That a conversation between the Trump administration and progressive proposals will reach a similar mechanism, in which the state has a stake on behalf of the public, is a measure of how unstable the question of who benefits from AI has become.
For now, this is a report on talks, not a policy or agreement. The negotiations are described as preliminary, the share transfers as hypothetical and voluntary, the dividend as one idea among several.
But the fact that the conversation is taking place indicates the extent to which the relationship between the US government and the AI industry has changed, from independent regulation to something that, if it ever materialized, would make the state a co-owner of what it is supposed to oversee.
