The leading AI labs are now worth more than most countries' entire stock markets, and the question of who should own a piece of that wealth has moved from ideation to direct talks with the White House.

This week OpenAI put a number on it. The company proposed giving the federal government a stake of roughly 5%, worth about $42.6 billion at its $852 billion valuation, and floated the idea that each leading US lab contribute a similar slice to a public fund modeled on the Alaska Permanent Fund. According to the Financial Times, Sam Altman argued the cleanest way to spread AI's gains is to give the public a direct financial interest, an idea OpenAI sketched in an April paper proposing a public wealth fund that would hand citizens "a stake in AI-driven economic growth."

President Trump, who already put the government into a 10% Intel stake, has mused that this kind of arrangement "almost becomes a partnership with the American public." Senator Bernie Sanders wants a larger version through his American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, a one-time 50% tax on big AI firms' stock paid into a public fund. Representative Ro Khanna has pressed a parallel case with an annual data dividend that would pay Americans for the data they generate, and he has publicly defended Altman's "universal basic capital" pitch. The populist right and the progressive left are in somewhat of an agreement that the American public should benefit from the growth of the frontier AI companies, even if the application of it differs.

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