OpenAI already has a lineup of impressive investors ahead of its eagerly awaited initial public offering. But the ChatGPT-developer would reportedly like to add one more name: the U.S. government.
OpenAI has talked about offering a 5% ownership stake to the U.S. government, potentially via a sovereign wealth fund, the Financial Times reported Thursday, citing people familiar with the talks.
OpenAI didn't immediately respond to Barron's request for comment.
There would be a couple of potential benefits for OpenAI if the Trump administration were among its investors. Firstly, such an investment would act as an endorsement of OpenAI's technology and its valuation, which its most-recently announced funding round pegged at $852 billion -- and could rise to more than $1 trillion with its IPO.
President Donald Trump has been an active cheerleader for stocks -- such as Intel -- which the government has taken stakes in, which could help support OpenAI when it starts trading on the public market.
Secondly, the administration's backing could clear some regulatory obstacles. The U.S. government has been exerting more control over releases of AI models in recent weeks. Anthropic's Fable model was shut down for more than two weeks because of security concerns raised by the U.S. government before being unblocked after Anthropic pledged to implement additional safety measures.
OpenAI hasn't been exempt from such restrictions. Last Friday, the company said that its latest models, which operate under the umbrella name of GPT-5.6, will initially be made available to a small group of customers approved by the Trump administration, although it hopes to make them generally available in the coming weeks.
Thirdly, OpenAI's offer might also put pressure on other leading AI companies to also accept government investment -- which may include not just Claude developer Anthropic, but also Alphabet's Google, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, and any other company seeking to develop cutting-edge AI models.
Such an arrangement could reduce the risk that Microsoft or other major cloud companies choose to host cheaper Chinese AI and potentially bypass the market for OpenAI's own models. OpenAI and Anthropic have called out China's DeepSeek for distilling, or copying, their top models. DeepSeek hasn't directly responded to those claims but has said it achieves strong AI performance with innovative programming techniques.
Write to Adam Clark at adam.clark@barrons.com
This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
July 02, 2026 10:25 ET (14:25 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Comments