OpenAI offers Trump admin 5% stake to dodge regulation

openai has proposed giving the us government a 5% ownership stake, valued at about $42.6 billion based on recent funding, to ease tensions with the trump administration and mitigate regulatory pressure. sam altman argued this provides a financial interest in ai prosperity, though talks are early and it remains unclear if other ai companies would agree. this move follows aggressive government interventions, including export controls that stifled openai's models and restrictions on anthropic, signaling a shift toward state capture of ai wealth.