🤚 The Open-Palm Offering

In what can only be described as the tech industry’s most expensive peace offering since Google tried to buy the Department of Justice dinner, Sam Altman has proposed donating 5% of OpenAI’s equity to a U.S. sovereign wealth fund. The idea, first reported by the Financial Times, would theoretically allow every American citizen to become a part-owner of the company that wants to build God and charge $200 a month for access.

The proposal emerged from discussions between Altman and President Trump, who confirmed talking about “concepts where pieces could be given to the American public, where the American public essentially becomes a partner with the companies.” If that sentence feels like it was generated by an AI trained exclusively on campaign speeches and venture capital pitch decks, congratulations — you’re paying attention.

At OpenAI’s last reported valuation, 5% represents somewhere in the neighborhood of $15-20 billion. Which sounds generous until you remember that OpenAI lost $38.5 billion last year. So technically, Altman is offering America a share of the world’s most ambitious negative cash flow.

👐 The Two-Handed Political Calculus

Let us be clear about what this is: regulatory insurance dressed in populist clothing. OpenAI spent the last year navigating a White House that banned Anthropic’s models for 18 days on a whim and demanded individual customer approval for GPT-5.6. When the administration can vaporize your market access with a Thursday afternoon press release, offering equity isn’t philanthropy — it’s a protection payment that comes with a tax receipt.

The proposal also suggests that “other AI companies would donate similar stakes,” which is corporate for “if we’re going to bleed, everyone bleeds.” One imagines the group chat between AI CEOs went silent for approximately forty-five minutes after that detail leaked.

OpenAI’s own April policy paper frames the fund as enabling citizens to “participate directly in the upside of AI-driven growth, regardless of their starting wealth or access to capital.” This is the company that charges $200/month for its premium tier telling people who can’t afford that subscription that they’ll get equity instead. The math is touching.

👑 The Gold-Leaf Counter-Proposal

Enter Senator Bernie Sanders, who responded to Altman’s 5% offer the way a landlord responds to a tenant offering to pay a quarter of the rent: he proposed the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, demanding a 50% one-time tax on AI company stock for “systemically important” firms.

Fifty percent. Not five. Fifty.

The gap between Altman’s offer and Sanders’ demand is the distance between “we’d like to make a charitable contribution” and “we’ve reviewed your assets and concluded they belong to Vermont.” The talks, naturally, remain “preliminary” and would “likely require congressional approval” — which is Washington’s way of saying this will be debated for three years, watered down to 0.3%, and celebrated as historic legislation.

🌿 The Gentle Awakening

There is something poetically absurd about the richest industry in human history negotiating what percentage of itself to give away before it has produced a single year of profit. OpenAI made $13 billion in revenue and lost nearly three times that. The sovereign wealth fund would own 5% of a company that is, by traditional accounting standards, a very sophisticated bonfire.

But traditional accounting doesn’t apply when you’re building artificial general intelligence — or at least when you’re telling investors you are. In this economy, losses are vision. Negative margins are ambition. And offering the government a slice of your company isn’t charity; it’s acknowledging that the entity with the nuclear codes might eventually want a say in whether your AI can use them.

The American public may yet become shareholders in the singularity. They just need to wait for Congress to agree on what a sovereign wealth fund is, which AI companies qualify as “systemically important,” and whether 5% or 50% is the correct number. Given Congress’s track record with technology legislation, expect resolution sometime around the heat death of the universe, or the next election cycle — whichever comes first.

“Five percent of infinity is still infinity, but five percent of negative thirty-eight billion is a number we’d rather not discuss at this time.” — The Slap of Wisdom Wealth Distribution Bureau, filling out paperwork to become a systemically important publication