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Trump’s strange flirtation with AI socialism, explained

Uncle Sam and OpenAI may go into business together.

A new, bipartisan idea is taking Washington by storm: collective ownership of the means of production.

Last Friday, President Donald Trump announced that he would soon be meeting with the executives of top AI companies to discuss a financial “partnership.”

“There are concepts where pieces [of these companies] could be given to the American public, where the American public essentially becomes a partner with the companies,” Trump said. “And by doing that, they’re going to like it better.”

President Donald Trump says the government may take ownership stakes in major AI companies and share the returns with the public — an idea pitched to him by OpenAI’s Sam Altman.

Critics suspect OpenAI’s real aim is to insulate itself from regulation and competition by aligning its profits with the government’s interests.

A broad, well-governed public wealth fund could genuinely help counter AI-driven inequality.

But an informal deal between the White House and a few favored firms is more likely to breed cronyism than spread wealth.

By this, the president (seemingly) meant that the US government may take an ownership stake in major AI companies and then distribute the fruits of its investments to the general public, perhaps through universal dividend payments.

This proposal did not come to Trump via some undercover, socialist operative embedded deep within the White House — but rather, from the CEO of OpenAI.

As NOTUS reported last week, Altman first pitched Trump on the concept in early 2025 and discussions between the administration and OpenAI have heated up more recently. No deal has been finalized. But talks have centered on an arrangement in which top AI labs voluntarily donate shares to the government — an approach that might enable Uncle Sam to partially nationalize the AI industry without Congress passing any law.

Officially, OpenAI’s interest in effectively transferring wealth from its shareholders to Uncle Sam is public-spirited. The company maintains that advances in AI are likely to generate massive profits for top labs, while sowing wrenching disruptions through labor markets. Thus, to ensure that ordinary people “share in the upside” of AI-fueled economic growth, the company has called for the creation of a “Public Wealth Fund,” which would invest in “both AI companies and the broader set of firms adopting and deploying AI,” and then send a portion of the returns to every American. In other words, it would pay out a universal basic income (another popular idea in Silicon Valley).

Yet many suspect OpenAI’s motives are more self-interested: By giving the US government a direct stake in its success, the company may be trying to insulate itself from stringent regulation or open competition. Moreover, whatever Altman’s intentions, skeptics argue that the government getting into cahoots with individual AI companies is a recipe for cronyism and conflicts of interest. (Disclosure: Vox Media is one of several publishers that have signed partnership agreements with OpenAI. Our reporting remains editorially independent.)

These concerns seem well-founded. A narrow partnership between the federal government and select AI companies would plausibly do more to generate corruption than redistribute income.

Yet there is a real risk that artificial intelligence will shift massive amounts of income away from workers and towards capital. And a highly diversified, scrupulously managed public wealth fund could help mitigate that hazard. Unfortunately, the Trump administration has evinced little interest in that approach to social ownership (or in scruples more broadly).

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