According to sources quoted in the British Financial Times, the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, proposed that 5 per cent of the shares of the United States Sovereign Wealth Fund be transferred to the company and hoped that other AI companies would follow suit. According to the report, this idea is intended to improve relations with the United States Government while at the same time easing outside political pressure on the distribution of AI benefits.
The programme remains under preliminary discussion
Discussions are still at an early stage and the modalities of implementation, the scope of application and the legal path are not clear. The report mentions that if the programme enters the formal process, parliamentary approval is likely to be a step beyond the past, which also means that moving forward is difficult.
Trump had previously publicly mentioned similar ideas. In June, he stated that he had discussed a concept of “to make the American public a business partner”, whereby the benefits of AI corporate growth were indirectly shared by the public, but no clear percentage was given at that time.
OpenAI has put forward public fund ideas several times.
Altmann has been discussing the concept of “public AI funds” in public for some time now. In its policy paper, Industrial Policy for the Smart Age, published in April, OpenAI has proposed the establishment of a public wealth fund, which can invest directly in AI laboratories and enterprises that deploy related technologies.
According to this document, the returns can be distributed directly to citizens, allowing more people to share the benefits of AI-driven growth, rather than depending entirely on the individual ' s original wealth or ability to acquire capital. This also shows that OpenAI ' s presentation of relevant programmes has shifted from a discussion of principles to more specific institutional design.
There's a more radical version of American politics.
United States Senator Bernie Sanders presented a more radical version in June. He advocated a one-time 50 per cent tax on shares of AI and the inclusion of the collected shares in public wealth funds. The bill is called the United States AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act.
According to the proposal, this would include AI, which is identified as “systemically important”, and cover data centres, infrastructure and robotic operations. For companies such as Google, SpaceX, which are only part of the business, the proposal allows them to divest themselves of non-AI business in order to avoid the associated taxation arrangements.
However, the bill is not yet in the process of being considered by the Committee. By contrast, OpenAI's 5 per cent equity proposal is more like an enterprise's initiative to grant part of the equity, trying to find a compromise between AI's expansion and the distribution of public interest.