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The strangest political convergence of 2026 just got stranger. Donald Trump said Friday that the U.S. government may take direct equity stakes in AI giants like OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI \u2014 essentially endorsing the populist logic that Sen. Bernie Sanders articulated just days earlier, and validating the fears that have been building inside his own MAGA base for months.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou make them a partnership in this revolution,\u201d Trump told reporters Friday. \u201cIt would be a beautiful thing.\u201d<\/p>\n
For months, Trump tried to hold two contradictory positions simultaneously: champion of AI deregulation and defender of American workers threatened by AI disruption. That tension is snapping under pressure from an unlikely combination of forces \u2014 his own base, a Vermont socialist and Silicon Valley CEOs who read the writing on the wall before their own allies did.<\/p>\n
Steve Bannon\u2019s\u00a0War Room<\/em>\u00a0has been running episode after episode attacking AI companies for copyright theft, algorithmic job destruction, and the concentration of civilization-altering power in the hands of a handful of unelected technologists. Republican strategists were watching polling showing mounting disquiet about AI among MAGA voters in real time. Republican lawmakers had tried repeatedly to introduce legislation constraining the industry on job losses and child safety grounds \u2014 and been rebuffed by the White House each time.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Anthropic issued a stark public warning this week that its systems are advancing so rapidly they may soon be capable of self-improvement without human oversight, joining forces with archrival OpenAI in asking for more safeguards from Congress.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s response has been a June 2 executive order asking \u2014 not requiring \u2014 AI companies to voluntarily submit advanced models to a 30-day government review before public release. Trump had bailed on signing another, reportedly stronger, order weeks earlier. But this all may be a prelude to a giant taxpayer investment in massively unprofitable startup companies that are set to have mega-IPOs later this year.<\/p>\n The political moment Sanders seized this week had actually been in the making for months. As first reported by Notus<\/em> and confirmed by the Wall Street Journal<\/em> and Financial Times<\/em>, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had been privately pitching the idea of a government ownership stake to administration officials well before Sanders went public, and had outlined in April a formal proposal for a U.S. public wealth fund to give citizens a stake in AI-driven economic growth. The\u00a0FT<\/em>\u00a0also reported that Altman has since spoken directly with Sanders about the overlapping frameworks and was in Washington this week meeting with lawmakers and Trump administration officials.<\/p>\n Sanders\u2019 June 2 announcement of the\u00a0American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act\u00a0presented a bill that would impose a one-time 50% equity tax on the stock of the largest AI firms \u2014 payable in shares, not cash \u2014 channeling the proceeds into a public fund granting ordinary Americans voting rights, corporate board representation, and financial dividends from AI\u2019s gains. \u201cThe trillions created by AI should be used to improve the lives of all of us,\u201d Sanders wrote in a\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0op-ed. <\/p>\n The proposal drew immediate fury from David Sacks \u2014 Trump\u2019s former AI and crypto czar. \u201cNationalization of AI will accelerate the corporate-government fusion we\u2019re already sliding toward,\u201d Sacks wrote Friday morning. \u201cAmerica won\u2019t win the AI race if we beat China but end up with a CCP-style social credit system in the U.S.\u201d Hours later, Trump effectively endorsed the premise anyway.<\/p>\n Close watchers of the Trump White House are less surprised, as he has been nationalizing sections of the economy at an unprecedented rate for a Democrat or a Republican. The Cato Institute estimates the Trump administration already holds ownership stakes in roughly 20 private companies \u2014 via equity, warrants, and \u201cgolden\u201d shares \u2014 spanning mineral firms like MP Materials, semiconductor companies like Intel, and quantum computing players like IBM and GlobalFoundaries. AI would be the next entry on a list that has been quietly growing since January 2025.<\/p>\n Before taxpayers celebrate becoming AI shareholders, there\u2019s a number worth examining:\u00a0$44 billion. That\u2019s how much OpenAI\u2019s own internal documents project it will lose between 2023 and 2029, with a $14 billion loss projected for 2026 alone, The Information<\/em> reported. Meanwhile, Elon Musk\u2019s xAI lost $6.4 billion from operations on just $3.2 billion in revenue in 2025 \u2014 spending $2 for every $1 brought in \u2014 and that gap is widening.<\/p>\n Anthropic is the lone partial exception: the company is on pace for its first profitable quarter, with annualized revenues approaching $47 billion as of May, a 47-fold increase from early 2025. But even Anthropic\u2019s profitability remains fragile, built on a cost structure that has already consumed billions in training expenses.<\/p>\n The question neither the White House nor Capitol Hill answered Friday is the obvious one: a stake in companies burning tens of billions of dollars a year is not a sovereign wealth fund \u2014 it\u2019s a bailout in a blazer. Sanders\u2019 proposal would at least collect equity\u00a0before<\/em>\u00a0the cash burn continues, via the stock tax. <\/p>\n Palantir\u2019s Alex Karp warned his peers in an appearance on TBPN this week that \u201cthe momentum is on the side of people who want to nationalize\u201d these AI frontier labs. \u201cToo many of us are chill, waxing like, \u2018oh, like nationalization. It can\u2019t happen. America would never do that.’\u201d<\/p>\n Karp said he started calling \u201cthe titans of this world,\u201d presumably the big tech CEOs: \u201cI\u2019ve been telling them for six months we\u2019re going to be nationalized.\u201d Without saying it explicitly, he bemoaned the practice of AI washing, or laying off workers and blaming AI for it and getting a stock-price bump from investors. The political anxiety has a quantifiable foundation. Tech layoffs in 2026 have already surpassed 142,000, with several companies citing AI investment as the reason. Meanwhile, software developer employment for workers aged 22 to 25 has fallen roughly 20% from its 2024 peak.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have to be very careful to be more disciplined on the corporate side,\u201d Karp said. \u201cLike if you run around saying AI allowed you to fire two-thirds of your workforce and you did it because maybe your competitor\u2019s kicking your ass \u2026 you might as well just go sign up for Bernie Sanders\u2019 manifesto.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThese things are very, very explosive,\u201d he added. \u201cThe American people sense that there is something dangerous here.\u201d<\/p>\n For this story,\u00a0<\/em>Fortune\u00a0journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n #MAGA #hates #Trump #agrees #Bernie #time #partial #government #ownership<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The strangest political convergence of 2026 just got stranger. Donald Trump said Friday that the U.S. government may take direct equity stakes in AI giants like OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5915,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[4225,536,8009,8008,1329,6019,8395,735,1256,8396,748,1843,14,260,1135],"class_list":["post-5914","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-finance-news","tag-agrees","tag-anthropic","tag-bernie","tag-bernie-sanders","tag-government","tag-hates","tag-maga","tag-openai","tag-ownership","tag-partial","tag-sam-altman","tag-spacex","tag-time","tag-trump","tag-white-house"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5914","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5914"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5914\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5915"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5914"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5914"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5914"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Sanders lit the match \u2014 was Altman building the fire?<\/h2>\n
A beautiful thing \u2014 for whom?<\/h2>\n