Trump Administration Eyes AI Giant Stakes for Sovereign Wealth Fund

Published by James Harris on June 21, 2026June 21, 2026

The Trump administration wants a piece of America’s biggest AI companies, and JD Vance confirmed on Thursday that the president “likes the idea as sort of a sovereign wealth fund idea,” calling Trump “a very unconventional person” for a Republican to hold that view. No decision has been made, and the CEO meeting Trump promised “very shortly” has not happened.

The early-stage talks inside the administration have already split along cabinet lines: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent wants to use any AI equity to seed Trump Accounts, while Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick prefers routing it into a sovereign wealth fund. That internal disagreement matters because neither path has a mechanism yet. Bernie Sanders introduced a bill Thursday that would tax major AI firms 50% of their stock into a federal fund, projecting a $7 trillion pool paying Americans roughly $1,000 a year. The irony of a Republican White House and a democratic socialist senator converging on the same structural instinct, through entirely different ideological routes, is not lost on the people being asked to give up equity.

Microsoft and Meta have already brushed the idea off, and OpenAI remains the only major firm that has actively pitched government stake-taking, which it did last year.

Elon Musk pushed back on X Saturday, arguing it would be “better just to send money directly to the people from the Treasury,” and predicted AI-driven deflation would make redistribution concerns moot. Mark Cuban, also weighing in Saturday, called the sovereign wealth fund concept “not a plan” on its own, questioning who would actually represent taxpayers in negotiations with firms that still need to raise hundreds of billions in fresh capital. His point about governance is the sharpest one: sovereign wealth funds work when a state controls the asset class, not when it is negotiating for a minority stake in private companies that can still raise money elsewhere. Senator Cynthia Lummis called the proposal a “head-scratcher,” and Senator John Kennedy said of AI leaders, “I trust them like I trust the rest-stop bathroom.”

The timing is complicated further by recent export controls on Anthropic, which could make any industry CEO summit tense before it starts. SpaceX’s IPO trajectory has reportedly cleared a path for both OpenAI and Anthropic to go public, potentially near $1 trillion valuations each, which means the window for the government to acquire stakes at anything resembling reasonable terms is narrowing faster than the policy debate is moving.