Per the FT (via CNBC), OpenAI proposed handing the US government a 5% equity stake — roughly $42.6B at the last private mark — to defuse political pressure.
The proposal sits inside a broader framework in which Anthropic, Google, and Meta would cede similar stakes into a sovereign-wealth vehicle. Anthropic says it's had no such discussions.
The political backdrop writes its own punchlines: Trump has previously called government ownership in AI companies "a beautiful thing," and Bernie Sanders proposed 50% last month. Call it a negotiation.
Combined with the GPT-5.6 government guest list and the pre-release review Anthropic accepted to get Fable 5 back, a state equity stake would complete the picture: the US government not just as regulator of the frontier, but as shareholder in the race it referees.
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