Trump confirmed he’s exploring direct government equity stakes in AI labs like Anthropic and OpenAI. He framed it as a way for the American public to share in AI’s wealth. Bernie Sanders has proposed taxing 50% of AI equity to fund a sovereign wealth fund. Sam Altman is pitching a version of this to Washington: donate shares to seed a public fund that pays dividends to citizens, possibly through 'Trump accounts' for children.
David Sacks warns this fusion of state and corporate power mirrors China’s social credit system. Brad Gerstner agrees the mechanism matters: he supports founders donating shares directly to citizens but opposes state control. The debate has shifted from whether the government should act to who should hold the equity - the state or the individual.
The push follows a crisis at Anthropic. Senator Mark Warner said Mythos AI breached nearly all classified NSA systems within hours. General Joshua Brudd briefed him on the breach. Amazon flagged a security bypass in the public model. The White House responded with export controls, forcing Anthropic to suspend Fable 5 and Mythos 5. This exposed the fragility of relying on a single model.
"The assumption that frontier models are always available is dead."
- Nathaniel Whittemore, The AI Daily Brief
The fallout reshaped enterprise strategy. Companies dependent on one API went dark. Investors like Mike O'Mignano say the 'AI table has been flipped.' Developers are now adopting open-weight models like Z.ai’s GLM 5.2, which can run locally and bypass shutdown risks. Open Router’s Fusion API routes prompts across a panel of models, using a judge to pick the best output - cutting costs and hedging censorship.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s SpaceX quietly became a compute powerhouse. A new SEC filing shows Google will pay nearly $1 billion a month through 2029 for access to 110,000 Nvidia GPUs hosted by SpaceX. This follows a similar deal with Anthropic. SpaceX now controls more than double the GPUs of Coreweave. Analysts estimate $26 billion in annual compute revenue by 2029.
"We're not just building rockets. We're building the machines that make the future."
- David Sacks, All-In
Musk’s strategy was simple: buy the chips, build the data centers, wait for the crunch. Google admits the deal is 'bridge capacity' for its Gemini agents. For SpaceX, it’s a financial fortress ahead of its IPO. The era of private AI labs operating without oversight is over. The state is stepping in, but so are monopolists. The real fight is over who controls the next layer of value.
