Should the US government take a stake in OpenAI and Anthropic?

Key points

• OpenAI and Anthropic each filed for IPOs (initial public offerings, where a private company sells shares to the public for the first time) in June 2025.
• Both companies were founded explicitly to prevent the harms of unchecked, profit-driven AI development.
• Critics now say both have become the kind of corporate giants their founders warned against.
• Some policy observers are calling for the US federal government to claim a share of the companies' stock and use the proceeds for a national fund or taxpayer dividends.
• No legislation to do this currently exists; the proposals remain at the opinion stage.

OpenAI was founded in 2015, Anthropic in 2021, by people who genuinely worried that Google and Meta would build powerful AI with profit as the only compass. Their founders said their organisations were different: structured as safety-focused labs, working for humanity rather than shareholders.

That pitch has worn thin.

What changed?

Both labs have drifted toward the model they were created to resist. Market money followed the technology, and with it came market pressures. Both filed for IPOs in June 2025, and analysts immediately began floating trillion-dollar valuations. Senator Bernie Sanders had already sent letters to all three of the most powerful AI firms on 10 August warning that Congress would step in if they kept moving at their current pace, a sign that scrutiny isn't coming from the fringes.

The gap between founding promise and current reality has now sparked a serious policy debate, first surfaced in an opinion piece in The Guardian.

So what are people actually proposing?

The idea isn't complicated. If OpenAI or Anthropic fail to attract enough investor appetite at their IPOs, or even if they succeed, the federal government could step in and claim equity, a formal ownership stake, in the companies. That stake would sit inside a US sovereign wealth fund, a government-managed investment pool of the kind Norway has used for decades to share oil revenues with citizens.

Alternatively, the government could redirect a portion of the companies' revenues directly to taxpayers as a dividend, a regular cash payment, similar to the annual Alaska Permanent Fund cheque that Alaskans receive from oil royalties.

The logic: AI was built on publicly funded research, runs on infrastructure the public subsidised, and will reshape the economy. If the gains flow only to a small group of shareholders, that's a transfer of public wealth into private hands on a scale rarely seen.

Does this have any realistic chance of happening?

Not soon. No bill is before Congress. The proposals exist as arguments, not legislation, and the US doesn't currently have a sovereign wealth fund. Creating one would require political will that doesn't obviously exist.

But the framing is shifting from "how do we regulate AI" to "who actually owns the value AI creates". That's a bigger question, and it won't disappear when IPO buzz fades. The companies building tools that will affect your job and your healthcare are about to become publicly traded corporations, answering first to shareholders. Whether government has any role in balancing that is now, at least, part of the conversation.

Common questions

Could the government actually force a company to hand over stock?

In theory yes, through legislation, though it would face significant legal challenges. No government agency currently has that authority over private technology companies.

What is a sovereign wealth fund?

It's a pool of money owned and managed by a national government, usually funded by natural resource revenues or trade surpluses, and invested to benefit citizens over the long term. Norway's fund, backed by oil money, is the world's largest.