OPENAI offers Trump desperation Shares

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has proposed that AI companies hand over 5% of their shares to the US government — framed as a way to let the public benefit from AI's upside. But as I told De Volkskrant, it's more accurately described as a bribe.

The backdrop: the Trump administration has recently started restricting the rollout of advanced AI models on national security grounds. Anthropic's Fable and Mythos models were temporarily blocked from export, and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 was limited to a handful of government-approved customers. For companies that have invested billions on the assumption of global dominance, these restrictions are existential.

The situation is compounding. European calls for tech independence are growing louder, and Chinese competitors like Z.ai are rapidly closing the performance gap with American models. Meanwhile, domestic opposition to AI is mounting — over half of Americans expect AI to do more harm than good, and fourteen states are considering bans on data centers.

Altman's equity offer is a gamble: it could weaken OpenAI's upcoming IPO without any guarantee of favorable treatment in return. As I put it: there's no coherent American strategy on AI and national security to be found. It's completely incoherent.

Original article available here