EXCLUSIVE — President Donald Trump‘s claim that he’s speaking to the major American artificial intelligence companies about creating a “partnership” with the federal government caught some of the leading firms by surprise, four people familiar tell the Washington Examiner.
On Friday, Trump told reporters that he’d spoken to AI executives about making the American public “rich” by potentially having the government take an equity stake in the companies or exploring some type of public dividend. Last year, the Trump administration negotiated a deal to take a 10% equity stake in Intel, making the federal government the company’s single largest shareholder.
“There’s so much money and it’s so big, that there are concepts where leases could be given to the American public, where the American public essentially becomes a partner with the company, with the companies,” the president said, adding that “all” of the major companies would attend a meeting at the White House this week on the subject. “We’re talking about it, where the American people can benefit from the success of AI, and by doing that, they’re going to like it better.”
But no such meeting has been scheduled, according to people in the AI space and White House officials. Four sources familiar with the matter told the Washington Examiner that certain AI companies had not been engaged in the conversations the president alluded to.
“That kind of caught some people off guard. I think it was one of those things that you might have had one conversation with one guy, and it turned into like this whole thing,” one source explained. “That was largely an overexaggeration. He probably did have that [talk] with one person.”
Multiple sources told the Washington Examiner that they believe OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is the person who put the idea in Trump’s head as a means of further insulating his company.
“It’s hard to fail when the government is attached to you,” one person familiar surmised.
“We’re not surprised that this was something that the president would consider, and we don’t endorse the business model,” a second AI industry source added. “The first thought that we had was this is probably an OpenAI conversation, because OpenAI would rather have some level of government support to ensure that they don’t go belly up.”
A person familiar with Anthropic’s conversations with the government said the company regularly engages with the Trump administration, including on the security-focused executive order Trump signed in early June, but had not entered into “any conversations around equity.” Representatives for OpenAI and xAI, Elon Musk’s AI company, declined to comment for this story.
White House officials declined to characterize conversations the president has had with tech executives or comment on plans to schedule the meeting the president held last week.
“The White House continues to proactively engage across government and industry,” one official wrote simply.
A former top Trump White House aide, however, told the Washington Examiner that the president’s comments from last Friday are “classic Trump” and should be viewed as an “opening move” in getting the ball rolling on talks.
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“The media wants to talk about ‘Oh, he said there’s a meeting, but there isn’t a meeting,’ but this is actually 4D chess,” that person assessed. “The story isn’t that he said this before the meeting was scheduled. It’s that he’s using the bully pulpit to get something done that he wants to do.”
“He’s done this all the time in the past, just kind of wished these things into existence,” the former aide continued. “And guess what, the meeting will happen eventually because there will never be a more friendly AI president than Donald Trump, and all the execs know that. They’ve got to play ball or he can just turn off the money.”