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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.
That is exactly the point of this move, especially during the Trump administration.
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.
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.
And the state can exert control much more fairly (ie. to all competitors as well) with regulation and laws.
Regulations and taxes are seen as 'un-american' I suppose, while giving stock to the government is not somehow?
Taxes depend on laws (however imperfect and full of loopholes) that are equally applied across all corporations.
Government equity/profit stakes are exactly the opposite: negotiated per corporation and cede power to the corporation.
If Altman was honest about his question framing, the simplest answer would be "Tax AI companies more heavily and use the proceeds to fund universal social benefits / payments."
In contrast, a one-off 5% equity stake is a bribe and nothing else.
Think of it from the company's POV. As a very good mechanism to impede democratic control of the technology.
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.
it was long predicted that it is inevitable for national governments to fully nationalize AI labs and put them under military control
I'm not sure what's different here.
which is why no US defense contractor is given unsupervised access to nukes, even when maintaining them
AI is and does.
That would be the right way of doing this, if the government were interested.
Tax closed-model AI companies, buy Nvidia/AMD/Google hardware, build open-access datacenters, and offer access to academic labs with the caveat that resultant models must be open source.
Seems to me like it creates a lot of perverse incentives.
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"
I guess.
It may not be obvious but isn't one unethical and the other not so much?
For some operators they may highly prefer circumstances where it's impossible to tell the difference though.
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.
Bernie shooting for the moon here
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.
In a proper capitalist society the capitalists define the rules of the market by competing to own the most politicians. The capitalists best at buying political influence get a larger say in what the rules will be so as to align them with their specific interests regardless of damage to others. When rules are aligned to your specific interests, this is called a well regulated and fair environment. Otherwise it is called a repressive nanny-state deep state swamp. The only incentive the government should have is to grow the politicians' personal wealth by bargaining with capitalists for which policies get enacted. There are no exceptions to protect key industries like food production. Defense spending is, however, in most capitalists interests as they often need the use of violent force to eliminate or subsume competition in other nations. Defense will therefore always receive robust funding.
There’s zero reason to bail these ding dongs out. Their entire business proposition has been to keep warm by incinerating fresh cash.
lol what a weird way to start this post
Second, the actual issue: socialisation of common costs seems reasonable to me. You use it, you participate, it's not an absurd concept.
But if we think more deeply about this from the lens of human society, we ultimately end up with something like taxes.
So we might as well just have taxes.
There literally was no state (in its modern sense) until private property and the capitalist market. Feudalism or the Roman empire had an entirely different structure. The development of the modern state happened in concert with the development of classical liberal ideology, acts of enclosure, private property, and the capitalist market system.
Capitalism needs the state, taxes, police, and the military to coordinate competing interests, maintain property laws and social order, and to ensure its own stability generally.
... Now, what Trump and Bessent and Lutnick are busy engineering is a bit beyond that -- rentier / parasitical capitalism in which the state acts more like a committee of oligarchs taking a cut for themselves than a "neutral" cabinet of technocrats seeking market stability.
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
I find the concept of taxing stock trades in general interesting, but I believe it could have a bunch of undesirable side-effects.
Another really appealing tax suggestion IMO is the Zucman approach: You tax wealth at 2%, but deduct all the income tax from this. The motivation is that for the very wealthy, "nominal" taxable income is basically zero; and approach like this would take a fair cut from stock billionaires, while keeping things mostly unchanged for normal people.
Off-topic (asking as a foreigner): Does "eats crayons" imply a stint in the US Marines here, or can the phrase be used for non-military personnel, too?
My most-desired effect would be to reduce stocks that are traded (roundtrip: bought and sold) within MICROseconds. Even adding a 0.5% tax on all short-term holdings (i.e. less than a year held, within US) would effectively prevent non-human trading from occuring. I've worked in multiple datacenters in my career, and fibercable length can literally be a detectable factor/handicap [so exchanges e.g. make all cables the same length!].
Fun fact: 2025 was the first year that most publicly-traded stocks were transacted (officially) within darkpools (i.e. not sold on public exchanges, reducing the true effect of "price discovery").
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I live in a workingclass neighborhood, and am bluecollar myself; most of my friends/family/clients are Top 5%ers... their failure at perspective is that crimes happen for reasons... and a major reason on my street is literally that single mothers are starving in order to feed their children. If a man is around, he's probably not the father, and is probably living as another child to both Momma and BigGov (certainly not working; with rare exception, the only men that work on my street live alone).
In a non-military sense, "eating crayons" is similar in compliment: it's a satyrical poke at self that one might be highly "regarded" == not wise in a traditional sense [" 'g'==>'t' "]. But seriously folks: don't eat crayons ("silver" tastes best and makes sparklypoo).
Feel free to send a 5% donation to the government in your taxes every time you trade your tech stocks.
Having never sold any stock on a short-term basis (i.e. I am a long-term value investor), I also disagree on the abysmally low tax rates I pay for long-term selling. To paraphrase the great Warren Buffet: the ultrarich should be taxed more and its unfair that the taxcodes don't require it.
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Having spent the majority of my working life as a bluecollar electrician, I can assure that my wagie tax burden (as percentage of income) is much higher than most fellow employed-by-tech readers, here.
If you want to tax the rich, raise the cap on the capital gain tax rates for higher income (we already have the NIIT but you could raise it). If you think that capital gain taxes are unfairly low - they aren't, but let's say they are - just raise them. But a transaction tax is regressive and nonsensical. Being better than Sanders' proposals is no consolation in my book.
Though I’d say US is speeding with reimplementation of ruzzian style oligarchy (already happening with open corruption between government and broligarchs) with flavor of Chinese capitalism (this article).
employees are not given the power to legally take bribes, but the people running the company can (and it's not called a bribe, it's called business)
- 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.
I don't want public ownership of any private companies but this seems to be what slopulism leads us to
How are you reading that differently?
This would be hilarious if it didn’t negatively impact all the sane people who aren’t in the cult.
With a taxpayer stake in the company the odds that a corrupt administration will throw good money after bad due to corruption or stupidity goes way up.
If OAI blew up now a whole lotta of people who supplied money would be angry.
But those people are generally not the common person
But the pushback will be — ‘but china!’
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.