When a government starts talking about how „the American people" will benefit from artificial intelligence, it's worth asking who exactly will hold the shares. According to CNBC, the administration of Donald Trump is negotiating an ownership stake in OpenAI - the same model by which the state last year already took 10 percent of chipmaker Intel.

On Friday, Trump announced he had talked with AI companies about arrangements where „packages could be given to them for the public, so the American people essentially become a partner with the companies." Part of those shares, CNBC claims, would go into a so-called „Public Wealth Fund" that OpenAI itself recently proposed - with the idea of distributing revenues directly to citizens.

It sounds generous. But here's the fine print: according to Bloomberg, CEO Sam Altman has been seeking state ownership stakes in the big AI companies since early 2025. In other words, the initiative didn't come from a government wanting to protect the people, but from a company asking the state to come in as a partner. And a partner with the state rarely goes bankrupt afterward.

The idea unexpectedly drew support from the left as well. Senator Bernie Sanders this week proposed a one-time 50 percent tax that OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI would pay through a transfer of shares, arguing that it would give the public „a direct role in determining the future of this technology."

Not everyone is thrilled. David Sacks, Trump's former adviser for AI and crypto, warned that such a move would „accelerate the merging of corporation and state toward which we're already sliding anyway." And former Microsoft employee Dare Obasanjo said out loud what many are thinking: „The foundations are already being laid for a state bailout of OpenAI." The question isn't whether the people will be a partner - it's who's bailing out whom, and with whose money.