OpenAI's 5% would hand the public little money and no power

Two accounts of the same OpenAI proposal landed this week and split on the only detail that matters: the Financial Times reported that the company's 5% stake would go to the US government, Axios that it would go to Americans directly. Either way, the generosity is a rounding error. Five percent of a $10tn company — a valuation no firm in history has reached, and one that flatters OpenAI's current $852bn — comes to $500bn; divided across 340m Americans, that is about $1,470 a head, held in stock that pays nothing and cannot be sold and throws off an Alaska-style dividend of perhaps $37 to $74 a year. A streaming subscription or two, mailed once a year with the compliments of the most valuable company on earth.

Sam Altman, OpenAI's chief executive, has been carrying the idea from office to office — to President Donald Trump, to Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, to Scott Bessent at the Treasury — dressed each time in the language of generosity. The technology was trained, as Mr Altman has conceded, on the collected output of humanity; humanity, the reasoning goes, should get a cut. The model he keeps naming is the Alaska Permanent Fund, which has mailed residents a dividend off the state's oil wealth every year since 1980. It is a warm, familiar, faintly patriotic image, and it happens to describe two entirely different machines at once.

Cap-table stakes

That is the trouble with pointing at Alaska. The Permanent Fund is a sovereign fund: the state owns the corpus, a state-appointed board decides what it buys, and the check to residents is what comes out the far end, not the ownership itself. Gesture at it and you have described, in a single breath, a structure in which the government holds the shares and one in which citizens merely collect on them. Two competent newsrooms read the same briefing and filed opposite stories because the reference the briefing leaned on contains both answers and settles neither.

There is a second problem with the Alaska model, and it is arithmetic.