Your family’s $300 stake in OpenAI

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is in discussions with President Trump about granting the U.S. government a 5% equity stake in the artificial intelligence company, a proposal that would value the government's share at roughly $42.6 billion based on OpenAI's most recent valuation, according to a report by MIT Technology Review [1]. The talks, reported last week, revive a concept Altman has promoted since at least 2021, when he proposed that companies above a certain valuation pay 2.5% of their market value annually into a fund for American households [1]. OpenAI later outlined a narrower version of the plan in April, and the idea has drawn interest across the political spectrum: Senator Bernie Sanders has separately proposed giving Americans a 50% stake in top AI companies [1]. OpenAI, founded in 2015 as a nonprofit and restructured in 2025 into a for-profit public benefit corporation partially controlled by a nonprofit, was valued at $852 billion after a March funding round [1][2]. A 5% stake would therefore be worth about $42.6 billion. If distributed equally among the roughly 133 million American households, each would receive approximately $320 in equity [1]. The company is reportedly delaying an initial public offering until it can reach a $1 trillion valuation, though it continues to spend heavily on data centers and has not yet turned a profit [1]. Altman has drawn inspiration from the Alaska Permanent Fund, established in the 1970s to distribute oil revenues to state residents [1]. The logic for an AI dividend rests on two arguments: that AI models are trained on human-generated work without compensation, and that a payout could ease public anxiety over AI-driven labor market disruption [1]. OpenAI's proposal arrives amid intensifying global competition in artificial intelligence, spanning large language models, autonomous systems, and specialized hardware [8]. The company's flagship product, ChatGPT, released in November 2022, helped catalyze a surge of investment and public interest in generative AI [2]. Microsoft has invested over $13 billion in OpenAI and supplies Azure cloud computing resources [2]. The broader AI sector has seen extraordinary growth. Nvidia, which controls more than 80% of the market for GPUs used in AI training and deployment, became the first company to surpass $5 trillion in market capitalization in 2025 [3]. Amazon, through its Annapurna Labs subsidiary, develops its own AI chips including the Trainium line [7]. For OpenAI, the proposed government stake may serve strategic purposes beyond any eventual payout. The Trump administration has shown an appetite for technology deals, including an equity stake in Intel and a share of Nvidia's sales to China [1]. Maintaining favorable relations with the White House could help AI companies avoid regulatory actions, such as having their models classified as supply-chain risks, or secure assistance in countering Chinese competitors [1]. Altman himself has characterized the proposal cautiously. "The proposal may be more revealing as a political narrative than as a policy plan," he said [1]. Despite five years of discussion and an early pitch to Trump soon after he took office, concrete details remain sparse [1].