On: OpenAI ‘in early talks to give 5% stake to US government’

July 3, 2026

They are discussing giving a piece of the company to the government. A five percent stake, they say. The CEO speaks of sharing benefits. I read this and I must set the paper down for a moment.

I do not understand the transaction. A company, built by private hands and private money, proposes to give a portion of itself to a sovereign power. For what? For legitimacy? For protection? But the power of that sovereign is derived entirely from the consent of the people, including the people who built the company. It is as if a man, having built a chair, were to saw off a leg and present it to the carpenter’s guild, saying, “Now it is official. Now it is a chair.” The chair was already a chair. The act of giving away the leg only makes the chair less stable.

They call it sharing the benefits. But the government has no treasury it did not first take from the people. It has no authority the people did not first lend it. So this “sharing” is merely a circuit: taking from the many, giving to the institution, and then having the institution return a fraction, with its seal upon it, and calling that a benefit. Why not simply keep what is yours? Why must it pass through these hands to be sanctified?

The most curious part is the suggestion that other firms will do the same. One does it, and then it becomes the custom. Soon, not giving a portion will seem reckless, odd, a defiance of the natural order. But the order is not natural. It is a habit we are watching being woven in front of us. They are not being compelled. They are volunteering the first thread of their own harness, and calling it a partnership. I find myself genuinely puzzled. When did we all agree that a creation must buy its right to exist from the very entity that our collective permission sustains?