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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
I know OpenAI has delayed their IPO by a year (i.e. not publicly traded, yet), 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)
That's a terrifying idea that would destroy the stock market as we know it. 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.
----
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.
I would encourage you to log off for a bit. It sounds like you're wise enough to understand why posting things like "USA! USA! USA! USA! U$A! USA! USA! U$A! U$A! U$A! U$A!" is not a good use of your time.
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, the toptier taxrate was >50% (through democratic and republican, non-AIPAC, presidencies).
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.
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.
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").
----
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. But seriously folks: don't eat crayons ("silver" tastes best and makes sparklypoo).
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.
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.
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 who 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
145 comments
[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 57.3 ms ] threademployees 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)
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!’
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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).
Second, the actual issue: socialisation of common costs seems reasonable to me. You use it, you participate, it's not an absurd concept.
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.
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.
Bernie shooting for the moon here
source: middle-aged electrician, owns a little stock (and would happily pay trading taxes, either in/out/both)
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.
----
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.
Isn't it something when here in the USA:
•Top 10% own 90% of stock marketcap
•Top 1% own 50% " "
----
You were saying?
----
I am healthily "median," which is somehow not middle class, anymore! My neighborhood is second-worse quintile =|
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.
Honestly, both capital gains and waged income taxes are too low. During the most-prosperous times of this Semiquincentennial Country, the toptier taxrate was >50% (through democratic and republican, non-AIPAC, presidencies).
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.
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.
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").
----
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. But seriously folks: don't eat crayons ("silver" tastes best and makes sparklypoo).
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.
Today's is explicitly more like Putin's Russia: the state has been captured by a series of private interests who 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.
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.
Sanders doesn't want that actually.
Taxes are not investments in your company.
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.
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.
Under normal circumstances the government owning stocks is just as un-american, but nothing is normal when it comes to AI.
Incentives: Management always gets rewarded for maximizing dividends and minimizing taxable income.
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.
AI is and does.
which is why no US defense contractor is given unsupervised access to nukes, even when maintaining them
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
- by giving Trump a share of 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.