Trump's "American AI Partnership" Plan: The President Says He's Meeting AI Firms About Government Stakes — Here's Why Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Bernie Sanders All Have an Opinion

The Strangest Political Convergence of 2026: Trump and Bernie Sanders Both Want a Piece of Big AI

On Friday, June 5, 2026, aboard Air Force One, President Donald Trump confirmed to traveling reporters one of the most unexpected and consequential policy ideas of his second term: the United States government is actively considering taking direct equity stakes in leading artificial intelligence companies, and the president intends to meet with AI company leaders in the "very near future" to advance those discussions. "There are concepts where pieces could be given to the American public, where the American public essentially becomes a partner," Trump said. The president said he is meeting with AI companies "in the very short, very near future." The development — reported first by Notus on Thursday and confirmed by Trump the following day — has triggered an immediate and fascinating political realignment: the same week Trump endorsed the concept, Senator Bernie Sanders introduced the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, proposing a 50% government stake in leading AI companies. For the first time in years, the populist left and the MAGA right appear to be converging on the same diagnosis of the AI economy — even if their prescriptions differ dramatically in scale.

What Exactly Is Trump Proposing? The Voluntary Equity Framework

The plan being discussed between the Trump administration and AI companies is specifically voluntary in nature — and that distinction is crucial for understanding both its political viability and its legal architecture. The government is considering a plan that would involve AI firms voluntarily ceding some shares to the government, in an attempt to more broadly distribute the economic benefits of AI to the public. The conversations have been described as voluntary, meaning no one is forcing AI companies to hand over shares. A voluntary framework suggests something closer to a negotiated partnership than a government seizure.

The most detailed public articulation of what a government AI stake would actually look like comes from OpenAI's own April 2026 policy proposal, which outlined the concept of a "Public Wealth Fund" as a mechanism for distributing the economic benefits of AI broadly. As part of the potential agreement, OpenAI could donate equity to the U.S. government to seed something like the "Public Wealth Fund" that the company outlined in its April policy proposal. OpenAI said the fund could "invest in diversified, long-term assets" and would enable citizens to participate in the "upside" of AI growth, possibly by receiving the fund's returns directly. No official investment terms have been decided, and the details are still subject to change.

For a comprehensive breakdown of the political and financial dynamics behind Trump's AI equity proposal, CNBC's exclusive reporting on the Trump-Altman discussions includes direct sourcing from officials familiar with the deliberations and detailed analysis of how any equity transfer might be structured legally and financially.

Sam Altman's Long Game: How OpenAI's CEO Pitched This Idea to Trump Since Early 2025

The government AI stake concept did not emerge from a policy paper or a congressional hearing — it emerged directly from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who has been systematically cultivating this idea at the highest levels of the Trump administration for well over a year. Altman first pitched the concept directly to President Donald Trump in a conversation in early 2025, and has discussed it again with senior administration officials in recent weeks as a way to more broadly distribute the economic benefits of AI to the public.

Altman's motivations for pursuing this concept are multiple and strategically sophisticated. At the most basic level, giving the US government a financial stake in OpenAI transforms the government from a potential regulator and adversary into a financial partner with a direct interest in OpenAI's commercial success. It creates a political constituency at the highest levels of the executive branch for OpenAI's continued growth, favorable regulatory treatment, and protection from competitive threats — including from Chinese AI companies and from rival American AI firms. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has been pitching this concept since early 2025, discussing it directly with Trump and revisiting it with senior administration officials throughout Trump's second term. The week of June 5, 2026, saw Altman in Washington meeting not only with Trump administration officials but also with Sen. Bernie Sanders, who has said he plans to introduce legislation to transfer 50% of the equity in the top AI companies to a public fund.

Who's In, Who's Out: OpenAI Yes, Anthropic Definitively No

The political landscape within the AI industry around the government stake proposal is sharply divided — and the division maps almost exactly onto the existing fault lines between OpenAI and Anthropic that have defined the AI policy debate throughout 2026. A person familiar with the matter said Anthropic is not having conversations with the administration about providing equity to the government. Anthropic, the AI safety-focused company that's been preparing for an IPO alongside OpenAI, has publicly confirmed it is not involved in these discussions.

The Anthropic exclusion is not simply a business preference — it reflects a much deeper and more fundamental rupture between Anthropic and the Trump administration that unfolded in dramatic fashion earlier in 2026. President Trump ordered the U.S. government to stop using Anthropic's products and the Pentagon moved to designate the company a national security risk, in a sharp escalation of a high-stakes fight over the military's use of AI. The administration's decisions capped an acrimonious dispute between Anthropic and the Pentagon over whether the company could prohibit its tools from being used in mass surveillance of American citizens or to power autonomous weapon systems. With that backdrop, Anthropic's non-participation in the government equity discussions is less a business decision and more a logical consequence of its near-total exclusion from the administration's AI partnership ecosystem.

For Elon Musk's xAI — which merged with SpaceX earlier in 2026 — the equation is entirely different. Donald Trump said Friday that the U.S. government may take direct equity stakes in AI giants like OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI. Musk's deep personal relationship with Trump and his active participation in the administration through DOGE positions xAI as a natural candidate for any government AI equity framework — though the governance questions this would raise, given Musk's simultaneous roles as DOGE advisor, CEO of SpaceX (a major government contractor), and CEO of xAI, are significant.

The Financial Reality Check: OpenAI's $44 Billion in Projected Losses

Before taxpayers become enthusiastic about becoming AI equity holders, the financial fundamentals of the companies involved deserve serious scrutiny. Before taxpayers celebrate becoming AI shareholders, there's a number worth examining: $44 billion. That's how much OpenAI's own internal documents project it will lose between 2023 and 2029, with a $14 billion loss projected for 2026 alone. Meanwhile, Elon Musk's xAI lost $6.4 billion from operations on just $3.2 billion in revenue in 2025 — spending $2 for every $1 brought in — and that gap is widening.

This financial reality creates a paradox at the heart of the government equity proposal: the US government would be acquiring stakes in companies that are burning through capital at an extraordinary rate, on the expectation that their future revenue trajectories will eventually turn those losses into profits sufficient to fund a meaningful "Public Wealth Fund" distribution to American citizens. The analogy to the government's existing portfolio of equity stakes is instructive — and not entirely reassuring. The Cato Institute estimates the Trump administration already holds ownership stakes in roughly 20 private companies — via equity, warrants, and "golden" shares — spanning mineral firms like MP Materials, semiconductor companies like Intel, and quantum computing players like IBM and GlobalFoundaries. AI would be the next entry on a list that has been quietly growing since January 2025.

The Bernie Sanders Wildcard: 50% Ownership and the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act

The most politically incongruous element of the entire government AI stake story is the emergence of Senator Bernie Sanders as one of the most prominent proponents of the concept — albeit in a form that is dramatically more aggressive than what Trump and Altman are discussing. In early June 2026, Sen. Bernie Sanders introduced the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, which proposes a 50% government stake in leading AI companies. Sanders's framing is rooted in his longstanding critique of concentrated corporate wealth: AI systems are trained on data generated by millions of ordinary Americans and built on decades of publicly funded research — and the economic benefits should accrue to the public whose knowledge and tax dollars made them possible, not merely to the small number of private investors who happened to own equity when the technology reached commercial scale.

Trump's framing is more transactional than ideological — the public as partner in American innovation, the government as steward of a technology that is reshaping national security and economic competitiveness — but the underlying logic of public benefit sharing runs through both proposals. That convergence is what makes this moment so historically unusual: a policy idea that simultaneously attracts the populist left's fairness arguments and the America First right's national sovereignty arguments is genuinely rare, and its emergence in the context of AI's rapid ascent suggests it will be a permanent feature of the political landscape regardless of which version — Sanders's 50% or Altman's voluntary small stake — ultimately advances.

The Governance Crisis: Regulator, Customer, and Investor at Once

Perhaps the most serious and underappreciated challenge posed by government AI equity stakes is not financial but structural — the fundamental conflict of interest created when the federal government simultaneously wears three hats in relation to the same company. A government stake would come with immediate governance questions. If federal officials owned part of an AI company, they could be pulled between promoting competition, policing safety, and protecting taxpayer returns. That would blur the line between regulator, customer, and investor, especially as agencies such as CISA, the Department of Homeland Security, the Office of Management and Budget interact with AI firms.

These governance tensions are not hypothetical — they are already present in the administration's existing AI relationships. The Pentagon's simultaneous role as OpenAI's major customer (through the post-Anthropic defense contract) and potential equity partner creates obvious incentives to favor OpenAI's commercial interests in regulatory decisions and procurement processes that affect competing AI providers. Scaling this structure to include formal equity stakes would formalize and intensify these conflicts across multiple federal agencies.

What Comes Next: The White House Meeting and the Legal Questions

Trump's confirmation that he will meet with AI company leaders "in the very near future" sets the stage for what could be a defining moment in American technology and economic policy. The immediate unanswered questions are significant: The legal mechanism for any company to voluntarily hand over stock remains unclear, and a White House spokesman declined to comment. The existing precedent — the administration's equity stakes in Intel, IBM, and quantum computing companies — was structured through specific procurement and investment frameworks that may not translate directly to the AI context, particularly for pre-IPO companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.

The timing is acutely sensitive: OpenAI and Anthropic are both moving toward major public-market steps, with Anthropic confidentially filing its IPO prospectus with the SEC on June 1 and OpenAI preparing its own confidential filing. Anthropic's last publicly reported valuation was $965 billion after a late-May funding round, while OpenAI's was $852 billion in March 2026. Anthropic also said its revenue run rate reached $47 billion in May, up from $10 billion in annual revenue a year earlier. Any government equity arrangement announced before these IPOs would have immediate and potentially dramatic effects on both companies' valuations, governance structures, and the terms of their public offerings — making the timing and structure of Trump's upcoming AI company meetings as consequential for financial markets as for technology policy.