US government

The move that recurs isn't a stock purchase — it's the off-take deal, where Washington becomes co-owner, co-funder and guaranteed customer at once. The MP Materials template: a stake plus a 10-year rare-earth price floor plus a promise to buy the output.

HN reached for every ideology at once — socialism, fascist corporatism, state capitalism. The most grounded voice wasn't reaching: a former Obama/Biden-adjacent policy hand, now a VC, called it bipartisan industrial policy with a long lineage, not an aberration.

Altman's pitch: it shares AI's upside with the public, modeled on Alaska's oil fund. The reported terms include an ask for Anthropic, Google and Meta to match, with talks running through Trump, Lutnick and Bessent.

HN read it as strategy, not generosity. If the government owns a slice of OpenAI, how does it regulate OpenAI — or bless a rival's merger? One founder called it a Trojan horse for 'too big to fail' status. Another asked: if the public shares the upside, why 5% and not 50%?