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.
You're asking the wrong person, I didn't downvote you. I am challenging your opinion with evidence of sama's uniquely sinister ambitions.
Can you elucidate why you think Sam is the better horse to bet on? From what I can see, he's the biggest zealot by quite a margin, in addition to being a chronic liar.
True, especially since President Sanders tends to be a bit heavy-handed on exerting political pressure. He's been issuing an unprecedented number of executive orders since he took office...
A 5% stake in an overvalued private company without public financials and with an indeterminate timeline to profitability is a bailout. Shareholders cash out while the taxpayer is stuck with the bill.
"Demand". What kind of government would you like ?
Sanders doesn't want that actually.
Taxes are not investments in your company. They're your contribution to the infrastructure and people to help your company grow. In theory. The US seems to just let rich not pay.
I think many americans on both sides sides of the aisle are in the mood for a government that demands a stake rather than asking nicely. If there’s a loser in the last 10 years of politics it’s the Cato Institute economic libertarians.
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.
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.
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.
I didn't mention specific politics because those are mutable. Sometimes good sometimes bad. What is in place today can change tomorrow, but holding 5% of a sketchy investment, it's a bit different. Having to bail them out.. It's another mess.
>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.
Besides direct control, what could a dividend on the profits do what a well-proportioned corporate tax on profits cannot do? The state would only get dividends assuming it would not sell shares.
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.
Why assume it wouldn’t sell shares? If the state can take 5% ownership, it can sell that 5% for profit, and come back for another 5% next year. Ideally the rules on when to sell would be systematic, or made by a neutral bipartisan committee of advisors, but I suspect maybe it would be just be up to the treasury (like the crypto it now holds).
Strange conclusion to reach. Taxes are generally assessed periodically (annually for income, property taxes, etc…). Time is money. The tax assessor always comes back for more, as long as there is more to tax.
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.
>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.
We have had for decades any number of defense contractors in the U.S. not taken by force by the U.S. They seem to have, nonetheless, happily produced what the military was wanting to purchase.
The difference is that military procurement (a) isn't sold to the general public (try buying a machine gun) and (b) doesn't provide an opportunity to surveil and control the population (no citizens are also using F-35s to search how much Trump has made from crypto ventures).
As far as I'm aware, this was only predicted by play acting effective altruists who tend to have a histrionic outlook around further developments of large language models.
Are you saying that the "effective altruists" are responsible for the cabal of bigtech+reactionary elites salivating at the power of pervasive surveillance + machine intelligence ? While the former certainly supplement the fervor of the latter, I think they would exist regardless.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
Or instead, they could just continue the simple route of taxing companies via corporation tax and dividend tax without having to worry about ownership at all.
I agree, I think we should go back to the old system of letting them be fully private and just taxing their gains heavily to pay for the public debts/needs.
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
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.
Good. Maybe this will incentivize a push to make the regulatory agencies truly independent, like the fed. the executive branch is clearly not up to the task.
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.
> 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.
This is a trick to lock in "too big to fail" status and have leverage to lobby the government to ban "dangerous" Chinese models that are "robbing the taxpayer". 100% Trojan horse.
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.
This is a vision of 'proper' but certainly not the only one. Another version many of the very rich would like to see is given below.
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.
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
That's a terrifying idea that would destroy the tech stock market as we know it. We already have incentives in capital gain taxes to encourage longer term ownership.
Feel free to send a 5% donation to the government in your taxes every time you trade your tech stocks.
This is an order of magnitude less than Bernie's 50% per-tech-trade tax (obviously impossible & bad), which he suggested as a means to fund the inevitable UBI [turns out former presidentical candiate Michael Yang wasn't wrong, just early, with his 2020 prediction].
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.
The issues you raise aren't fixed by your proposal. A 5% transaction tax will hurt both the rich and small investors.
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.
Thank you for sharing your perspective. I'll continue to digest it as my workingclass place_in_this_world continues to shrink.
Honestly, both capital gains and waged income taxes are too low. During the most-prosperous times of this Semiquincentennial Country [USA 1946-1984], the toptier taxrate was >50% (through democratic and republican, non-AIPAC, presidencies). At least on paper...
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I agree that Sanders is too polar to accomplish anything, but his voice serves as a starting point for systemic problems.
For those of you that don't still live in "the hood" [like I choose to remain]: if only you knew how bad it is. Americans are literally starving; jobbed moms literally offering to do my dishes/lawn/anythingwinkwink.
It's not about the aggregate tax burden. You're a long-term value investor because you live in a country where stock trading is an easy and low-friction thing the average person can do. A 5% transaction tax isn't really compatible with that; we would end up regressing to the global norm, where stocks are an esoteric hobby for rich people and the normal way to save for retirement is a savings account or cash piles under your mattress.
>where stocks are an esoteric hobby for rich people
Isn't it something when here in the USA:
•Top 10% own 90% of stock marketcap
•Top 1% own 50% " "
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You were saying?
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I am healthily "median," which is somehow not middle class, anymore! My neighborhood is second-worse quintile =|
70%+ Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck (stat from 2022!) – it's higher on my suburban street (I'm one of only two, "not", out of dozens [i.e. with savings]).
An interesting proposition. Not sure if the outcome would be good, though; one result could be that "tech-related stocks" just stop being traded directly by bigger players, and people instead trade assets that hold such stocks (which reduces trade volume, and might result in the "trade tax" only being paid by small traders like you).
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?
>I find the concept of taxing stock trades in general interesting, but I believe it could have a bunch of undesirable side-effects.
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).
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.
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).
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.
But what would happen if no bailout came? I did not keep count of how many trillion USD they owe, but if we let OpenAI fail, what would be the consequences for ordinary people?
Before, Microsoft would have absorbed most of OAI, and other than a speed bump in our AI progress, I think we'd have mostly been fine.
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.
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.
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, in the case of a country like the United States, a legally sanctioned, representative approved (indirectly voter approved) means of supporting the needs of the nation/state as a whole.
Theft is distinguished from say, gifting money by consent. In a democracy mechanisms exist for our representatives to make decisions according to the consent of the people, to an extent.
You presumably live in a democracy so you presumably necessarily agree to abide by the laws of your nation which involve being governed by your democratically elected representatives.
First, the form: Starting a sentence with Objectively is not a magic way to make the sentence objective. It's a declaration of your intent to be objective, which isn't the case here, you're doing a reductio ad absurdum.
Second, the actual issue: socialisation of common costs seems reasonable to me. You use it, you participate, it's not an absurd concept.
The state / government is the only reason they're able to have money and profits in the first place.
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.
You are assuming a lot from the current state of affairs.
> The state / government is the only reason they're able to have money and profits in the first place.
Nope, money/currency precedes modern states and, its predecessor, credit/trust, is how human economies worked for most of history. The pursuance of profit is merely the consequence of humans being rational actors, i.e. we have been seeking profits since the start of consciousness as we know today.
> There literally was no state (in its modern sense) until private property and the capitalist market.
Private property precedes the modern state by quite a lot, and so do markets. Depending on how you define them, private property and markets exist since the inception of humankind. The liberals merely formalized these relationships.
> 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.
Except the state has been the one consistently violating it throughout history, both in its modern and ancient iterations. Socialist states are peak demonstration of this (although some could say they are also capitalist: state capitalist).
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.
Everything seems rotten with this administration.
And sama.
I'll take Sam over amodei.
It's a both are bad choice.
Sam, the proprietor of Woldcoin?
Amodei might play hardball, but he's got nothing on sama's evil villain ambitions.
Why downvote me for an opinion?
Anyways, I'll take a liar over a zealot anyday.
Honestly I'd say both are both. They just lie and are zealots about different things.
Ultimately they both want money and power, they just grasp for it in different ways.
You're asking the wrong person, I didn't downvote you. I am challenging your opinion with evidence of sama's uniquely sinister ambitions.
Can you elucidate why you think Sam is the better horse to bet on? From what I can see, he's the biggest zealot by quite a margin, in addition to being a chronic liar.
And Sama over Trump?
Which of these two administrations? :)
Wasn't Bernie saying the government should confiscate half of OpenAI and Anthropic. This seems like sama is just trying to get ahead of it.
True, especially since President Sanders tends to be a bit heavy-handed on exerting political pressure. He's been issuing an unprecedented number of executive orders since he took office...
5% vs 50% is a dramatic difference in how things would work out.
Not to mention that a government ownership stake also incentivizes a bailout if this all goes bust.
A 5% stake in an overvalued private company without public financials and with an indeterminate timeline to profitability is a bailout. Shareholders cash out while the taxpayer is stuck with the bill.
Is the government buying their stake or being given a stake? In the second scenario there's no bagholding.
With the way they're treading on, I'd not be surprised if a bailout happens in the next decade.
Why?
"Too big to fail."
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?
"Demand". What kind of government would you like ?
Sanders doesn't want that actually.
Taxes are not investments in your company. They're your contribution to the infrastructure and people to help your company grow. In theory. The US seems to just let rich not pay.
> Demand". What kind of government would you like
I think many americans on both sides sides of the aisle are in the mood for a government that demands a stake rather than asking nicely. If there’s a loser in the last 10 years of politics it’s the Cato Institute economic libertarians.
We really need to go back to the 95% tax system on these giant corps
I think that's just gonna make companies set up abroad. But an individual tax of asset wealth over 1 billion, I agree.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
I didn't mention specific politics because those are mutable. Sometimes good sometimes bad. What is in place today can change tomorrow, but holding 5% of a sketchy investment, it's a bit different. Having to bail them out.. It's another mess.
>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.
Besides direct control, what could a dividend on the profits do what a well-proportioned corporate tax on profits cannot do? The state would only get dividends assuming it would not sell shares.
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?
That's exactly the end run here.
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.
Why assume it wouldn’t sell shares? If the state can take 5% ownership, it can sell that 5% for profit, and come back for another 5% next year. Ideally the rules on when to sell would be systematic, or made by a neutral bipartisan committee of advisors, but I suspect maybe it would be just be up to the treasury (like the crypto it now holds).
Coming back for another 5% seems unlikely. But the whole thing is unlikely and uncommon, so what's it matter?
Strange conclusion to reach. Taxes are generally assessed periodically (annually for income, property taxes, etc…). Time is money. The tax assessor always comes back for more, as long as there is more to tax.
> Regulations and taxes are seen as 'un-american' I suppose, while giving stock to the government is not somehow?
Under normal circumstances the government owning stocks is just as un-american, but nothing is normal when it comes to AI.
Exacerbated by nothing being normal with this administration, to say the least.
> what could a dividend on the profits do what a well-proportioned corporate tax on profits cannot do?
Incentives: Management always gets rewarded for maximizing dividends and minimizing taxable income.
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.
what about the behavior of the US government currently has you thinking it would be democratic?
> 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.
>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
We have had for decades any number of defense contractors in the U.S. not taken by force by the U.S. They seem to have, nonetheless, happily produced what the military was wanting to purchase.
I'm not sure what's different here.
The difference is that military procurement (a) isn't sold to the general public (try buying a machine gun) and (b) doesn't provide an opportunity to surveil and control the population (no citizens are also using F-35s to search how much Trump has made from crypto ventures).
AI is and does.
no US defense contractor can threaten the US government
which is why no US defense contractor is given unsupervised access to nukes, even when maintaining them
As far as I'm aware, this was only predicted by play acting effective altruists who tend to have a histrionic outlook around further developments of large language models.
Are you saying that the "effective altruists" are responsible for the cabal of bigtech+reactionary elites salivating at the power of pervasive surveillance + machine intelligence ? While the former certainly supplement the fervor of the latter, I think they would exist regardless.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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%.
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?
Or instead, they could just continue the simple route of taxing companies via corporation tax and dividend tax without having to worry about ownership at all.
What's your basis for conflating government ownership with public benefit?
Seems to me like it creates a lot of perverse incentives.
I agree, I think we should go back to the old system of letting them be fully private and just taxing their gains heavily to pay for the public debts/needs.
Agreed. 5% seems like enough to throw a dog a bone, but not have enough skin in the game
Does OpenAI not have mandatory compliance training which forbids them from giving any government a bribe as a condition of doing business?
thats for employees so they don't profit from government deals
You're saying it's not bribery if the CEO does it?
Have any CEOs been held criminally liable for bribing government officials lately?
yes, this is how the system is designed
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)
No they’re saying the CEO isn’t barred from bribery.
bribery is illegal; this is not
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"
Russian Oligarchy is actually the best comparison there is.
There's a huge difference between being shaken down highway robbery style "versus" pre-emptively paying the toll in advance for safe passage.
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.
> There's a huge difference between being shaken down highway robbery style "versus" pre-emptively paying the toll in advance for safe passage.
We've seen the shakedown of Anthropic out in the open. It's reasonable to assume that Sam Altman has seen it as well.
> It seems like saw Russian Oligarchs and instead of being morally repulsed they thought "hmm that is quite nice, I would like that"
Trump was saying that for years. He admires Putin. And you guys have still elected him.
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
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.
Good. Maybe this will incentivize a push to make the regulatory agencies truly independent, like the fed. the executive branch is clearly not up to the task.
The Supreme Court this week announced they would not allow independent regulatory agencies but the Federal Reserve.
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
The difference is that we can get to the moon
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
This is a trick to lock in "too big to fail" status and have leverage to lobby the government to ban "dangerous" Chinese models that are "robbing the taxpayer". 100% Trojan horse.
100%. I'd add: Whoever hasn't downloaded GLM 5.2 should download GLM 5.2 immediately.
Wait, how does the public benefit from the gains of Open AI with this scheme?
um, no? “The government” owning a stake in OpenAI is different from “the people” owning a stake.
How are you reading that differently?
The voter base who hates big government and communism is getting USSR-style state owned industry from its beloved leaders.
This would be hilarious if it didn’t negatively impact all the sane people who aren’t in the cult.
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.
This is a vision of 'proper' but certainly not the only one. Another version many of the very rich would like to see is given below.
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.
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
That's a terrifying idea that would destroy the tech stock market as we know it. We already have incentives in capital gain taxes to encourage longer term ownership.
Feel free to send a 5% donation to the government in your taxes every time you trade your tech stocks.
This is an order of magnitude less than Bernie's 50% per-tech-trade tax (obviously impossible & bad), which he suggested as a means to fund the inevitable UBI [turns out former presidentical candiate Michael Yang wasn't wrong, just early, with his 2020 prediction].
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.
The issues you raise aren't fixed by your proposal. A 5% transaction tax will hurt both the rich and small investors.
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.
Thank you for sharing your perspective. I'll continue to digest it as my workingclass place_in_this_world continues to shrink.
Honestly, both capital gains and waged income taxes are too low. During the most-prosperous times of this Semiquincentennial Country [USA 1946-1984], the toptier taxrate was >50% (through democratic and republican, non-AIPAC, presidencies). At least on paper...
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I agree that Sanders is too polar to accomplish anything, but his voice serves as a starting point for systemic problems.
For those of you that don't still live in "the hood" [like I choose to remain]: if only you knew how bad it is. Americans are literally starving; jobbed moms literally offering to do my dishes/lawn/anythingwinkwink.
I voluntarily remain celibate.
It's not about the aggregate tax burden. You're a long-term value investor because you live in a country where stock trading is an easy and low-friction thing the average person can do. A 5% transaction tax isn't really compatible with that; we would end up regressing to the global norm, where stocks are an esoteric hobby for rich people and the normal way to save for retirement is a savings account or cash piles under your mattress.
>where stocks are an esoteric hobby for rich people
Isn't it something when here in the USA:
•Top 10% own 90% of stock marketcap
•Top 1% own 50% " "
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You were saying?
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I am healthily "median," which is somehow not middle class, anymore! My neighborhood is second-worse quintile =|
70%+ Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck (stat from 2022!) – it's higher on my suburban street (I'm one of only two, "not", out of dozens [i.e. with savings]).
USA! USA! USA! USA! U$A! USA! USA! U$A! U$A! U$A! U$A!
An interesting proposition. Not sure if the outcome would be good, though; one result could be that "tech-related stocks" just stop being traded directly by bigger players, and people instead trade assets that hold such stocks (which reduces trade volume, and might result in the "trade tax" only being paid by small traders like you).
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?
>I find the concept of taxing stock trades in general interesting, but I believe it could have a bunch of undesirable side-effects.
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).
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
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.
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).
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.
this will be a disaster
Just a reminder: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/13lgbir/sam_altman...
I'd settle for Altman and his ilk paying a proper progressive income tax.
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.
Oh, you have NATO allies now? And in the future what… “we leave NATO if you don’t buy enough “tokens”? Go and build a wall.
Donald won’t be POTUS too much longer, hang in there, less than 3 years to go.
This is how they will secure eventual bailout.
This is how they will get permission to release GPT 5.6
Both of you are correct. This is bailout attempt #2.
But what would happen if no bailout came? I did not keep count of how many trillion USD they owe, but if we let OpenAI fail, what would be the consequences for ordinary people?
Before, Microsoft would have absorbed most of OAI, and other than a speed bump in our AI progress, I think we'd have mostly been fine.
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.
Nothing
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!’
The people who supplied money are not retail investors. They are rich people who have power and influence and connections to politicians, media etc
Sure because never ever in history losses of rich people and companies have been socialized and have been assumed by those "risk takers".
Isn't this mostly circular? Let pichai, nadella and friends hold the bag. We'll be fine.
My Mom wouldn’t be able to make AI images of her dog Chico as a pirate anymore.
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?
Zero until they turn a profit.
Until or, better yet, if.
Gotta give them the benefit of the doubt. But I agree.
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.
No, taxes are taxes and theft is theft.
Taxes are, in the case of a country like the United States, a legally sanctioned, representative approved (indirectly voter approved) means of supporting the needs of the nation/state as a whole.
Theft is distinguished from say, gifting money by consent. In a democracy mechanisms exist for our representatives to make decisions according to the consent of the people, to an extent.
You presumably live in a democracy so you presumably necessarily agree to abide by the laws of your nation which involve being governed by your democratically elected representatives.
Right, I didn't approve my money taken away.
How is it a bailout if the government just takes 5% of the shares?
The bailouts and or special treatment start afterward.
Why? We think the government would care about maximizing its own revenues?
That depends.
Is the government staffed by people with US market investments?
staffed by people with who have investments that rely on deals with OpenAI?
…staffed by people who believe they have more in common with sama than you?
Seems possible.
They could do that even if the government didn't have a stake though.
> Taxes are theft
lol what a weird way to start this post
Objectively it’s absurd to have an organization take a significant portion of your money on threat of imprisonment just to invest it in a corporation
First, the form: Starting a sentence with Objectively is not a magic way to make the sentence objective. It's a declaration of your intent to be objective, which isn't the case here, you're doing a reductio ad absurdum.
Second, the actual issue: socialisation of common costs seems reasonable to me. You use it, you participate, it's not an absurd concept.
Is there a way not to participate and not be taxed? If there's no choice then it's a moot point
Precisely. But don’t worry a bunch of responders will soon tell you that the end justifies the means.
Yes, if we only look at absolute morals and first-order effects, yes.
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.
The state / government is the only reason they're able to have money and profits in the first place.
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.
You are assuming a lot from the current state of affairs.
> The state / government is the only reason they're able to have money and profits in the first place.
Nope, money/currency precedes modern states and, its predecessor, credit/trust, is how human economies worked for most of history. The pursuance of profit is merely the consequence of humans being rational actors, i.e. we have been seeking profits since the start of consciousness as we know today.
> There literally was no state (in its modern sense) until private property and the capitalist market.
Private property precedes the modern state by quite a lot, and so do markets. Depending on how you define them, private property and markets exist since the inception of humankind. The liberals merely formalized these relationships.
> 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.
Except the state has been the one consistently violating it throughout history, both in its modern and ancient iterations. Socialist states are peak demonstration of this (although some could say they are also capitalist: state capitalist).