- The Trump administration is negotiating to receive equity in OpenAI through a "Public Wealth Fund," with OpenAI donating shares rather than selling them.
- Sam Altman first pitched the arrangement in early 2025 and revisited it with senior White House officials this week.
- Anthropic is excluded from the discussions after the White House ordered federal agencies to stop using its AI in February 2026.
What the White House and OpenAI are negotiating
President Trump confirmed on June 5 that the administration is examining the possibility of the US government taking equity stakes in major AI companies. Speaking to reporters on Air Force One, he described the proposed arrangement in plain terms:
"There are concepts where pieces could be given to the American public, where the American public essentially becomes a partner."
President Donald Trump, aboard Air Force One, June 5, 2026The structure under discussion is not a government purchase. OpenAI would donate equity to the federal government, seeding what the company has branded a Public Wealth Fund. In its April 2026 public policy agenda, OpenAI described the fund as one that would "invest in diversified, long-term assets" and let citizens participate in "the upside of AI growth, possibly by receiving the fund's returns directly."
Altman first raised the concept with the Trump administration in early 2025. He revisited it with senior officials in Washington this week as part of broader conversations about AI regulation and national strategy, according to CNBC. No deal terms, share amounts, or timelines have been confirmed publicly. The discussions remain active.
The arrangement would formalize a relationship between the US government and OpenAI that has been building since the start of the current administration. OpenAI has participated in White House AI initiatives, contributed to the AI Action Plan, and recently made its models available on government cloud infrastructure.
Why Anthropic is not at the table
The most significant detail in the equity stake story is the one that has received the least attention: Anthropic is not part of these negotiations. In February 2026, the Trump White House ordered all federal agencies to immediately stop using Anthropic's AI after the company declined a Pentagon request to deploy Claude without its standard safety guardrails. Anthropic refused to remove those constraints as a condition of the contract.
That refusal cost Anthropic its federal government business relationships. It has now placed Anthropic outside the Public Wealth Fund framework as well. xAI, by contrast, has maintained closer ties to the administration, and senior US officials have confirmed that discussions extend beyond OpenAI to other AI companies.
The equity negotiations are therefore not simply a financial arrangement. They reflect which AI labs have accepted a particular terms-of-trade with the current administration, and which have not.
A government equity stake in OpenAI would formalize a political alignment that has been building for over a year. The Public Wealth Fund framing gives it a broadly appealing name, but the underlying structure is straightforward: OpenAI offers the government upside in what may become the most valuable company in the world; the government offers regulatory goodwill, procurement relationships, and a credible claim that American AI serves the public interest. Anthropic's exclusion is not an oversight. It is the direct consequence of refusing to separate its safety practices from its commercial terms.
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