Who owns the labs

On June 5, Trump told reporters his administration is negotiating an equity stake in OpenAI, calling it "a beautiful thing" that "almost becomes a partnership with the American public." The structure is unusual: OpenAI would donate, not sell, shares to seed a public fund that pays dividends to citizens — an idea OpenAI itself floated in an April policy paper. The same week, Senator Bernie Sanders introduced a bill that would seize half the equity of any AI firm above $200 million in revenue and hand it to a federal fund. Altman met Sanders for an hour, backed public ownership in principle, and rejected the 50% figure.

Anthropic, named in the Sanders bill, said it had not discussed the idea with anyone — and was left out of Trump's conversation entirely.

Strip away the politics and the two camps want opposite things. Trump's version is a voluntary gift that buys goodwill and a dividend check; control stays with the company. Sanders' version is a mandatory transfer worth roughly $7 trillion, run by a Senate-confirmed commission — public ownership with public decision-making power, which is a different thing entirely. The convergence is on the slogan, not the mechanism.

Nothing is enacted. Trump's is a negotiating position roughly a year from any deal; the Sanders bill has almost no path through this Congress. What makes the week worth marking is that the question stopped being hypothetical and started being negotiated — against the same three companies, at the same time, with public opinion broadly behind the idea of government stakes, even if the exact mechanism remains contested.