OpenAI has proposed handing the U.S. government a 5 percent stake in the company as a way to defuse mounting political pressure over artificial intelligence, the Financial Times reported Thursday. Based on the $852 billion post-money valuation OpenAI reached in a March funding round, the holding would be worth roughly $42.6 billion.

Chief Executive Sam Altman pitched the stake to the Trump administration as part of a broader arrangement under which Washington would take 5 percent of each leading U.S. artificial-intelligence developer through a sovereign wealth fund vehicle, the FT reported, citing two people familiar with the talks. The framework would cover Anthropic, Alphabet's Google and Meta Platforms alongside OpenAI. None have publicly agreed, and it is not clear whether any will.

On the table

Altman argued that giving the public a financial interest in the company was the best way to share the upside of AI, according to the FT account relayed by CNBC. The 5 percent figure came from Altman himself in early discussions with the White House, the report said, and follows an April proposal from OpenAI to create what the company called a "public wealth fund" that would hold assets tied to the growth of AI firms and distribute the benefit to the public.

The pitch is the culmination of more than a year of talks. CNBC reported last month that Altman first raised the idea directly with the Trump administration in early 2025.

The Washington squeeze

Pressure on the U.S. AI industry has intensified through the spring. Washington has grown wary of cybersecurity vulnerabilities in the models and of rising competition from Chinese open-source systems that are proving almost as capable as top American models and significantly cheaper, CNBC reported.

Anthropic, the maker of the Claude platform, felt the sharpest edge of that pressure last month. The company disabled access to its most advanced Mythos and Fable models to comply with a federal export-control directive, and on Tuesday said it had been cleared to restore access after resolving policymakers' safety concerns. The Verge reported that the Pentagon earlier this year designated Anthropic a supply-chain risk.

Precedent in Intel

The Trump administration already owns pieces of several private companies. The federal government obtained a 10 percent stake in Intel after an $8.9 billion investment in the chipmaker's common stock in August last year, CNBC reported, and has taken positions in IBM and in quantum-computing and critical-minerals firms during the president's second term. In May, Trump said he should have asked for a bigger stake in Intel.

The Verge reported that the administration has also demanded Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices hand the federal government 15 percent of their revenue from AI chip sales to China. Trump has described the U.S. taking an ownership stake in AI giants as "a beautiful thing" that would make Americans "partners in this revolution," CNBC reported.

The math

A 5 percent slice of OpenAI at the March valuation implies a paper holding of about $42.6 billion. That would make the federal government one of the company's largest shareholders in a single stroke, ahead of most of the venture and sovereign investors that participated in its record-breaking primary round.

Counterpoint

As of Thursday, no organized political opposition to the arrangement had surfaced in the initial reporting. The White House, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta did not immediately respond to CNBC's requests for comment. The Verge noted the discussions remain in their early stages, and neither the details of the proposed sovereign wealth fund vehicle nor the mechanics of how a 5 percent stake would translate into governance rights have been published. Senator Bernie Sanders has separately proposed a one-time 50 percent tax on the stock value of AI companies to fund a public vehicle, The Verge reported, a sharper version of the same redistribution instinct.

Whether Anthropic, Google and Meta accept Altman's framework, or whether OpenAI, having volunteered the number, ends up ceding equity alone, will determine whether Thursday's disclosure becomes a template for the U.S. AI industry or a single-company concession.