Sam Altman's company is voluntarily inviting regulation and taxation in a move that could reshape how AI firms interact with Washington, while Solana-based proxy tokens take a beating.
OpenAI is doing something almost unheard of in Silicon Valley: asking the government to take a piece of the company. The AI giant has been in discussions with the Trump administration about handing the US government a 5% equity stake, valued at roughly $42.6 billion based on the company’s $852 billion valuation from March 2026.
The conversations were first reported by the Financial Times on July 2, and they paint a picture of a company trying to get ahead of the regulatory wave rather than getting swept up in it.
CEO Sam Altman has personally pitched the idea to President Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.
The equity proposal is just one piece of a broader regulatory framework OpenAI laid out in an April 2026 white paper titled “Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age.” The document advocated for modernized taxation tied to automated labor and the creation of a public wealth fund designed to spread the economic gains of AI more broadly across society.
OpenAI’s 5% offer looks quite different when you consider what some lawmakers actually want. Senator Bernie Sanders has proposed the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, which would give the public a 50% stake in leading AI companies.
Solana-based proxy tokens that offered indirect exposure to OpenAI and Anthropic shares dropped nearly 40% in May 2026. The decline came after warnings about unauthorized SPV stock transfers, essentially regulators flagging that these tokenized exposure vehicles might not be as legitimate as they appeared.
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