OpenAI's 5% Offer to Washington Is Really a Vendor-Risk Story
OpenAI has reportedly proposed handing the U.S. government a 5% equity stake, worth about $42.6 billion at its $852 billion valuation, according to the Financial Times. Sam Altman frames it as sharing AI's upside with the public through an Alaska-style sovereign fund. But the offer landed days after Washington delayed GPT-5.6, no deal is signed, and Anthropic reportedly isn't in the conversation. For PMs, the real signal is strategic: if your regulator becomes your vendor's shareholder, the frontier model layer may be turning into a utility you're captive to, not a market you can freely shop.