On: OpenAI ‘in early talks to give 5% stake to US government’
July 3, 2026
The news that OpenAI is in “early talks” to surrender a five-percent stake to the United States government is a development that would have amused my grandfather, though it would have utterly bewildered him as a matter of constitutional law. Mr. Altman, playing the role of a modern-day Prometheus who has decided to invite the fire department onto his board of directors, suggests this move will “share the benefits” of his creation. It is a charming sentiment, delivered with the practiced sincerity of a man who knows that when the Dynamo becomes too powerful for the state to ignore, the only way to avoid being crushed by the gears is to become part of the machine itself.
We are witnessing the final collapse of the distinction between the sovereign and the circuit. In the nineteenth century, the state struggled to catch the railroad; in the twentieth, it attempted to harness the atom; now, in the twenty-sixth year of this frantic century, the state is being offered a seat at the table of an intelligence it cannot comprehend, let alone govern. The five-percent stake is not a partnership; it is a confession. It is the admission that the velocity of these new forces has so far outstripped our eighteenth-century political architecture that the only remaining method of “regulation” is for the government to become a shareholder in its own obsolescence.
One wonders what the Treasury will do with its five percent. Will it vote for the preservation of the soul, or merely for a higher dividend of processing power? The education of a gentleman once involved the study of Cicero and the mastery of law; today, it apparently requires one to understand how a federal bureaucracy might exercise “oversight” over a black box that thinks ten thousand times faster than a Senate subcommittee. The container is melting, and the liquid fire inside is being offered to the guards as a gift. It is a masterstroke of political theater, ensuring that when the explosion finally comes, the government will be legally required to go down with the ship.