Industry leaders will soon gather at the White House to discuss the idea, the president said. The comments come as SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI prepare to go public.
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President Donald Trump said on Friday that he is considering taking a government stake in leading artificial intelligence companies.
The suggestion follows previous deals in which the Trump administration has taken stakes in major companies including chipmaker Intel, breaching traditions that previously protected American firms from government intervention.
Leaders of “all the big” AI companies are coming to the White House as early as next week to discuss the idea of the government taking stakes in the firms, Trump told reporters in remarks on Air Force One.
“It almost becomes a partnership with the American public,” he said. Trump added that “the American people can benefit from the success of AI, and by that, they’re going to like it better.”
Trump’s comments come as the private companies SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI — three of the leading players in the industry — prepare to offer their stock for sale to the public, likely creating new trillion-dollar companies in coming months.
Some tech industry and political leaders see the potential for widespread economic disruption if AI unleashes growth but also pushes people out of work as their jobs are replaced by the new breed of computers.
Supporters of the government taking a stake in the industry see it as a way to share the proceeds of its growth, while softening the economic consequences for a broad swath of the public.
Most Americans are gloomy about the future impact of AI, according to recent surveys. More than 70 percent of American adults believe AI is moving too fast and 51 percent are more pessimistic than optimistic about the technology’s long-term effect on society, according to a May poll from YouGov and the Economist.
OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman has been discussing the idea with Trump and other White House officials since early in his second term, according to a person familiar with the outreach.
Altman’s vision is for his company to donate some portion of itself to a government fund, with other AI firms joining the effort, said the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private deliberations. The discussions were first reported by the news site NOTUS.
OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX and Google — which is seen as the leading public AI company — did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Trump’s proposal or the meeting.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) on Monday outlined his own proposal for the U.S. government to take significant stakes in leading AI companies, through a new American sovereign wealth fund, and also be represented on the boards of the firms. Sanders discussed his version of the idea with Altman during a meeting on Capitol Hill this week.
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“The American people understand that the economic system is rigged, the rich are getting richer, working people are going nowhere in a hurry,” Sanders said in an interview with The Washington Post. “So I think there’s a lot of anxiety all over this country, and AI simply adds to it. People feel powerless.”
Trump has embraced the tech industry’s ambitions for AI in his second term. Altman first discussed the government taking a stake in his company with the president last year, after the CEO had spent time raising funds in the Middle East and Asia, where he met with sovereign wealth funds in several nations, according to another person familiar with the deliberations at the time.
OpenAI executives became interested in the structure of the funds and the idea of governments taking a stake in such consequential technology, the person said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.
Since then, the idea of taxing the wealth of AI companies or finding some other way for the public to share in their growth has gained traction in Washington as fears have mounted over the technology’s potential to put large numbers of people out of work.
In April, OpenAI outlined a proposal for a “Public Wealth Fund,” saying it would allow people who did not have money to invest in the stock market to reap a financial benefit from the industry’s success.
Taking direct stakes in AI companies could raise new questions about the relationship between the federal government and some of the most powerful companies in the U.S. economy.
Some leading tech figures who backed Trump in the 2024 presidential race cited their concern at President Joe Biden’s attempts to regulate and gather information from AI companies. Trump signed an executive order this week establishing a way for tech firms to voluntarily give the federal government early access to powerful AI systems, to allow time to prepare for security risks.
David Sacks, a tech investor and the former White House AI czar, panned Sanders’s vision of public stakes in AI companies in a social media post Friday. The investor said government ownership of the industry would lead to Chinese-style censorship and surveillance.
“Nationalization of AI will accelerate the corporate-government fusion we’re already sliding toward,” he wrote.
Sacks added a warning for those on the political right considering more government involvement in AI to help manage the technology’s impacts.
“Conservatives are right to fear where this is all headed but ought to think more carefully about how regulations they are flirting with now … are widely celebrated among those with a long history of lust for Big Government,” he wrote.
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Elizabeth Dwoskin contributed to this report.
