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This feels a bit off.. How is the government supposed to be able to regulate them impartially when they're literally invested in them.

What if a competitive startup startup starts to really take away from OpenAi's profits and then all of a sudden requires some approval for merger with Anthropic for example, I don't know if I would trust the government to be fair in their decision here.

Leaving aside the potential for letting the government(tax payers) hold the bag if there is a collapse.

I assume that’s why Altman wants the government as a co-owner.
Wouldn’t the solution to that be for the government to also demand a 5% stake in every AI company? Along the lines of what Sanders wants to do?
> How is the government supposed to be able to regulate them impartially when they're literally invested in them.

That is exactly the point of this move, especially during the Trump administration.

You’re completely correct, of course, but I also think it’s worth remembering that the current regulatory environment is also made up of people, so the opportunity for corruption is already there. It does seem preferable to at least have the government putting its thumb on the scales to benefit the country at large, versus money under the table that benefits politicians and bureaucrats.
This is quite literally government control of the means of production, which is the central tenet of the economic philosophy that the right repeatedly claims is their greatest mortal fear: socialism.
The Trump/Bessent/Lutnick grouping has no interest in regulating "impartially." Quite the opposite. That's the illusion of US capitalism 30 years ago.

Today's is explicitly more like Putin's Russia: the state has been captured by a series of private interests, one of whom is kingmaker, and you have to pay to play.

It's transactional and parasitical, not bureaucratic or regulatory. As long as the King and his friends get their cut your bridge can open, your new AI model can launch, or the US gov't will back up your crazy business with gov't debt.

It's not a stable system, but it's a system.

>This feels a bit off.. How is the government supposed to be able to regulate them impartially when they're literally invested in them.

Was the government impartial to begin with? Or were they stomping things and handing out favorable treatment based on the political whims of the minute?

Seems to me like "hey buddy you own some (but not too much) of this too so play the long game" provides somewhat of a counter incentive.

Will it work? Will it do the opposite and make things worse? Heck if I know.

This is 9 years old. Shows that Sam Altman has been thinking about this for a while https://blog.samaltman.com/american-equity
Discussed also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15789108.
>The proposal would also involve other US AI companies giving a similar stake to the government, the FT reported, although it is not clear yet whether companies such as Anthropic, Google and Meta would agree to the plan.

I can't see Google or Meta shareholders agreeing to this? That said, Google, Meta, and SpaceX are all still founder-controlled using supervoting shares.

the choice is progressively giving more of the company to the government, or the government taking it by force

it was long predicted that it is inevitable for national governments to fully nationalize AI labs and put them under military control

I may be naïve or completely uninformed, but given the federal government’s vast resources, including supercomputers, national laboratories, the NSA, and many talented employees, why does the federal government need OpenAI or Anthropic for that matter when it has the resources to build its own LLM, even one exclusive for government use? The federal government has a long history of technical feats, such as the atomic bomb, the ARPANET, and the moon landing. Couldn’t it build its own state-of-the-art LLM?
Supercomputers aren't useful for training LLMs, and the best researchers would have politically infeasible pay requirements. I'm sure the government could acquire a bunch of GPUs and make it happen, if for some reason we had to, but it's easier to do outside of the government.
All of these examples are Cold War era or before, when defense and aerospace was a much more collectivist venture with far less private sector involvement.

After the Cold War, McKinsey and big 4 consultancies are working in every part of government, ostensibly to make government as efficient as the private sector. The NSA's surveillance program wouldn't have seen the light of day had Booz Allen not had a contract with them.

Seems to be a very bad mechanism to ensure democratic control of the technology. There must be better ways, even naively assuming that OpenAI is somehow genuine about wanting to broadly share its stake in the future.
> Seems to be a very bad mechanism to ensure democratic control of the technology.

Think of it from the company's POV. As a very good mechanism to impede democratic control of the technology.

what about the behavior of the US government currently has you thinking it would be democratic?
Interesting. But if Sam really believes that the US public should share in the benefits of AI surely the number should be 50% not 5%.
What's your basis for conflating government ownership with public benefit?

Seems to me like it creates a lot of perverse incentives.

Why 50% and not 100%? The obvious answer is it creates strange incentives. Maybe something like 5% across the board for all large tech companies make sense?
Does OpenAI not have mandatory compliance training which forbids them from giving any government a bribe as a condition of doing business?
I sound conspiratorial - but everything happening in the US around AI + Crypto has the fingerprints of David Sacks and Theil on it. You can hear them talk about these things and then they happen.

Sacks has talked extensively about the US government having stakes in tech companies for months and months on the All In pod.

It seems like saw Russian Oligarchs and instead of being morally repulsed they thought "hmm that is quite nice, I would like that"

With the USA and Israel tightening their intelligence agencies / secret service exchange, and now pulling in OpenAI -- that's a very effective strategy to exercise more worldly dominance
It would not be without problems and mistakes in execution over time, but I think the US and our NATO allies should nationalize AI research and development in a sweeping manner, and NATO membership ought be revised to hinge on that.

In the US, for example, all intellectual property of OpenAI, Anthropic, et al. would become public domain through custody of the Federal government, probably in an expansion of the NSF. All AI research and development would be required by law to be done in the open: open source code, transparent training data, reproducible models.

We may not see it yet, but, this is a way to capture government and use that to suppress competition and any dissent.

The moment the government owns equity, every regulatory decision becomes conflicted. The top 3-4 AI companies in whic the givernment owns equity, will become too politically entangled to fail or to let fail or be meaningfully competed against, or "allowed" to be competed against.

This will also lead to drasitc increase in surveillance state since givernment will now have a fudiciary, and "political" duty to increase dividends, "for citizens". One way to do that will be to purchase large amounts of surveillance equipment and tech disguised as "safety".

Any public dissent can now be indirectly suppressed by threatening with a perceived decrease in dividends or value of the sovereign wealth fund, thus, affecting healthcare, and other public expenditure.

This also sets a very bad precedent for other governments to follow. This will end up with givernments of major nations to act in similar fashion, thus, expanding this dystopian setup further.

Not a great move imo from a business stand point, given the heightened supply chain risk that global (non-US) corporations and sovereigns are already associating with the frontier labs.

I like that it's going to drive more momentum towards the open source/weight models. I was hoping that it would be a slower burn though.

Some advantages this gives OpenAI:

- Altman takes away Musk's power as Trump's favourite tech friend.

- the government won't punish OpenAI too hard, because it makes money when OpenAI does well.

- the government can look at the user's data without any problems.

- OpenAI's competitors are forced to give the government a share in their companies too.

- when OpenAI sells shares to the public, investors will trust it more because the government is involved.

- every American could get a yearly check from OpenAI's profits, so voters will protect OpenAI.

- Sam Altman becomes friends with politicians from all sides, so nobody dares to investigate him.

> Altman has also reportedly spoken with the Democratic senator Bernie Sanders in recent weeks. The senator has been pushing for the creation of a sovereign wealth fund overseen by an independent commission and financed through a one-time 50% tax on the stock of the biggest AI companies.

Bernie shooting for the moon here

Isn't this what people wanted? The public to have access to the gains of these companies?

I don't want public ownership of any private companies but this seems to be what slopulism leads us to

In a proper capitalist society the government defines the rules of the market, aligned with the interests of several parties, and then companies compete within that well regulated and fair environment. The only incentive the government should have is to grow the entire market, so that they can collect more tax. There might be minor exceptions to protect key industries like food production or defense, but these should be a small as possible to ensure healthy competition.

It’s something entirely different when the government starts taking a stake in individual companies instead of the market as a whole. This can easily bias the government to pick OpenAI for certain contracts, or enact laws that benefit OpenAI more than its competitors. It reduces competition which hurts the overall economy, and it is an obvious vector for corruption which hurts the efficiency of the government.

It’s great if we can leverage AI to design the next great government system. A 5% stake feels more like a bribe to help push through some of these datacenter projects and enact friendly laws.

I know OpenAI has delayed their IPO by a year (i.e. not publicly traded, yet; so: no dividends), but wouldn't it be better for the Government/bottom 95% if instead of taking ownership, they taxed all tech-related stocks 5% every time they're traded – this is a perpetual stream of income, and would likely reduce speculative short-term trading...

source: middle-aged electrician, owns a little stock (and would happily pay trading taxes, either in/out/both); know nothing unrelated to copper; eats crayons

But governments cannot be trusted, better give it to an independent entity like they did with the Qatari jet
This smells like an incoming bailout
This is how they will secure eventual bailout.
It seems that the US may be in a process of signing itself up for many of the drawbacks of Chinese-style state capitalism (regulatory conflicts of interest, opportunities for politicians to rent-seek) with stakes small enough that the taxpayer will see little real economic benefit.
This feels more communist than communist China. They typically take about 1% in Golden Shares that give them a board seat.
AI was already too big to fail, this just locks it in. Talk about a trojan horse.
I'd settle for Altman and his ilk paying a proper progressive income tax.
soft nationalization
Sad, but I'm unsurprised by this. Is it just me, or USA (or most modern governments) seem to be trying to copy China's economic and governmental model? Specially conservatives. I get the impression they are jealous of the PRC.
How much is a 5% stake in a money pit really worth?
This is just a way to keep the AI bubble going. The American people will not benefit from having a "stake" in AI companies. Doing so will serve only to expand the amount of capital available to AI companies for them to waste on a technology that will never live up to expectations. The US govt taking a "stake" in OpenAI and its competitors will only grant those organizations more power to further misallocate the nation's capital for their own enrichment. Instead of taking a stake, the US govt should use copyright and antitrust law to dismantle these companies and their backers in big tech, and shut this wasteful Ponzi scheme down, so that AI can find a role in the economy that suits its actual capabilities.
Taxes are theft. This is absurd.

There’s zero reason to bail these ding dongs out. Their entire business proposition has been to keep warm by incinerating fresh cash.