President Trump says the US government might take equity stakes in OpenAI and Anthropic, though he insists full nationalization is off the table.
The comments came in a TIME interview conducted at the White House on September 28 by Eric Cortellessa and Sam Jacobs, published Thursday. Trump ruled out the government seizing or running the AI labs outright. But he left the door open to Washington holding a financial stake in both OpenAI and Anthropic, two of the best funded companies in the field. TIME published the full interview transcript alongside the story.
A government stake in a frontier AI lab would be a new kind of entanglement between Washington and the companies racing to build the most powerful models, raising questions about regulatory favoritism and conflicts of interest. It also signals that the administration sees AI leadership as a strategic asset worth partly owning, not just regulating from the outside.
Governments trading subsidies for equity has already shown up in the chip industry. Doing the same with AI labs would be a much bigger bet, on companies whose core product is still mostly a promise.