Should Americans get an equity stake in AI? Trump and progressive Democrats float public ownership of AI

Hello and welcome to Eye on AI. Beatrice Nolan here, filling in for AI editor Jeremy Kahn, who is in Aspen at Fortune Brainstorm Tech. In this edition…The plan to give Americans a stake in AI…OpenAI files a confidential S-1 with the SEC…Anthropic rings the alarm on “recursive self-improvement'”..and AI consciousness goes mainstream.

Last Friday, President Donald Trump surprised reporters aboard Air Force One by suggesting that the U.S. government may take direct equity stakes in leading AI companies. “There are concepts where pieces could be given to the American public, where the American public essentially becomes a partner,” he told them. “You make them a partnership in this revolution.”

The remark, which seemingly came out of nowhere, dragged back a debate that first emerged early last year. According to reports, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had been privately pitching the idea of government ownership to administration officials since early 2025, and had revisited it with senior officials in Washington this week as part of broader talks about AI regulation.

Trump and Altman aren’t the only ones floating the idea of government involvement in the AI industry. In an unusual ideological convergence, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) proposed a one-off 50% tax raid on AI labs while Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, went further, arguing the government should force AI companies to hand over 50% of their equity.

Hamza Chaudhry, AI and national security lead at the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit focused on reducing existential risks from AI, told Fortune that what is striking about this moment is that leading progressive Democrats and the Trump administration are, from completely different starting points, converging on the same basic intuition. That is, that AI’s trajectory is “inseparable from the public interest, and that the wealth it generates cannot simply accrue to a handful of private actors.”

Both proposals are a signal that the politics around AI wealth have shifted materially, intensified by a wave of anti-AI sentiment—most visibly the April attack on Sam Altman’s home—and concerns about what three upcoming trillion-dollar-plus IPOs might do to the U.S. stock market and people’s pension funds.

Two proposals around donating equity stakes

While there is some crossover, the two proposals on the table are very different things.

The Trump/OpenAI framework is voluntary—AI companies would donate a small equity stake to the federal government rather than sell it. While its unclear what the equity stake would actually be, some industry sources are estimating somewhere between 1% and 5%.

The donated shares would seed what OpenAI has branded a “Public Wealth Fund,” outlined in the company’s April 2026 policy proposal, which says the fund “could be distributed directly to citizens, allowing more people to participate directly in the upside of AI-driven growth, regardless of their starting wealth or access to capital.” The structure is designed to avoid any taxpayer outlay or appropriations process, Chaudhry said, but the administration would likely need congressional authorization to hold equity in private companies under current law, or would need to route it through an existing or newly created government-affiliated entity.

In contrast, Sanders’ American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act is compulsory, mandating a 50% equity transfer, with the government gaining voting shares, board representation, and revenues directed toward cash payments and public goods.

OpenAI is currently valued at more than $850 billion by private investors and is reportedly preparing for an IPO as early as September. Donating........

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