First Washington Decided Who Could Run AI. Now OpenAI Wants to Give It a $42 Billion Ownership Stake — as a Gift.

A few weeks ago the US government stopped regulating AI and started allocating it — deciding who could run which model. Now OpenAI proposes handing the government an ownership stake in the industry: 1-5% of itself, up to ~$42.6B, donated (not sold), to seed a 'Public Wealth Fund,' framed as a template for every leading lab. Read past the civic branding and it's the regulated gifting the regulator a stake — reverse regulatory capture, at the moment the state controls frontier access and OpenAI is about to IPO. The governance conflict (a regulator that profits from the labs it gates) is acute, and who votes the shares — OpenAI's upside-without-control vs Sanders' 50%-with-control — is the whole fight.