OpenAI has proposed giving the US government a 5% equity stake in the company, according to reporting by the Financial Times that was quickly corroborated by CNBC, TechCrunch, Bloomberg and Axios on July 2. Based on the roughly $852 billion post-money valuation OpenAI set in a funding round earlier this year, a 5% holding would be worth about $42.6 billion.

The pitch: an Alaska-style AI dividend

CEO Sam Altman is reportedly pushing a broader structure modeled on the Alaska Permanent Fund, the sovereign wealth vehicle that pays Alaska residents an annual dividend from the state's oil revenue. Under Altman's proposal, every leading US AI developer — not just OpenAI — would contribute an equal equity share into a similar public fund, giving American taxpayers a direct financial stake in the AI industry's growth. Altman has reportedly discussed the idea with President Trump, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and has also spoken with Senator Bernie Sanders. Google, Meta and Anthropic have not indicated they would join such an arrangement, and the Financial Times described the discussions as conceptual and early-stage; any real implementation would likely require an act of Congress.

Coming after a GPT-5.6 delay

The proposal surfaced just days after the Trump administration pressed OpenAI to delay the full public release of GPT-5.6, invoking a June executive order that lets the federal government review frontier AI systems for national-security risk for up to 30 days before release. That episode had fueled criticism that Washington was gaining outsized informal control over which AI models reach the public without a clear statutory basis. Offering the government a direct financial stake is widely read as an attempt by OpenAI to reframe that relationship — trading a share of future upside for a more predictable, cooperative regulatory posture as scrutiny of frontier AI intensifies.

Why it matters

If any version of the plan advances, it would mark one of the most direct financial entanglements yet between the US government and a frontier AI lab, raising fresh questions about regulatory independence, oversight, and whether rival labs would be pressured to make similar commitments to stay competitive for government contracts and approvals. For now, the proposal remains informal, but it signals how central the relationship between Washington and frontier AI developers has become to how, and how fast, models like GPT-5.6 reach the public.