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Your family’s $300 stake in OpenAI
Sam Altman wants Americans to share in AI’s wealth. The proposal may be more revealing as a political narrative than as a policy plan.
James O'Donnellarchive page
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s oft-discussed promise that Americans will share in the wealth AI creates was in the news again last week. On Thursday, the Financial Times reported that Altman is in talks with President Trump about giving the US government a 5% stake in OpenAI.
In some ways, Altman’s plan is old news. He wrote about a more radical version of this back in 2021, proposing that all companies above a certain valuation (not just AI companies) pay 2.5% of their market value each year into a fund that sends Americans annual disbursements. In April this year, OpenAI described a narrower proposal that closely resembles what Altman is reportedly discussing with Trump now. And the notion has broad political appeal: Senator Bernie Sanders has proposed giving Americans a 50% stake in top AI companies.
What’s the logic here? For would-be recipients, it’s twofold. First, AI learns directly from human-generated work—books, movies, art—but AI companies generally never pay the authors of that work. A free equity stake could serve as a form of belated compensation. Second, the payout could mitigate the widespread anxiety that AI will cause a collapse of the labor market (even if economists disagree) by providing a safety net.
How large a safety net is up for debate. Details of OpenAI’s latest proposal are sparse, but let’s say the government were to distribute this equity stake directly to Americans. After its funding round in March the company was valued at $852 billion, making a 5% stake in OpenAI worth about $42.6 billion today (the company is reportedly delaying its IPO until it can reach a $1 trillion evaluation, a tall order given that it’s spending heavily on data centers and still has not turned a profit).
Distributing that $42.6 billion equally among the roughly 133 million American households would give each about $320 in equity. But if it were to operate like other wealth funds, the government would not give equity directly to Americans but rather let the fund grow and then share a portion of the returns with everyone, perhaps delivering a bigger payout, if and when AI companies can ever start sustainably turning a profit.
If this dividend does materialize, what’s in it for tech companies? Altman might hope the promise of payouts could help swing public opinion a bit more back toward AI companies. (A majority of Americans don’t trust companies to use AI responsibly and oppose construction of data centers in their area, and half are more concerned than excited about the increased creep of AI into their daily lives.)
But the bigger prize for OpenAI might be that the Trump administration loves making tech deals—like its equity stake in Intel and its share of Nvidia’s sales to China, among others. Staying on the administration’s good side is pretty essential for AI companies right now (just ask Anthropic). It could mean not having your models deemed a supply chain risk, or getting more help from the White House in stopping your rivals from China.
My main takeaway is that these plans currently function more as a story than a policy. Altman has been talking about some version of this idea for five years and reportedly pitched it to President Trump soon after he took office, yet there is still little indication that a concrete plan is taking shape. The more ambitious proposal from Sanders is even less likely to gain traction.
But what these plans do reveal is just how up for debate the future of AI still is. Altman drew inspiration for his plan from the Alaska Permanent Fund, which was set up in the 1970s to give Alaskans a share in oil profits. The idea was based on two premises: that oil is a shared resource, and that eventually it will run out. Altman seems happy to concede the first claim about AI. But he’d balk at the second, having promised that AI will generate extraordinary wealth for decades to come. Whether Americans ever receive a check is beside the point; the proposal’s real purpose may be to convince them that the AI boom will be large enough to share.
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