Trump administration, OpenAI discussing possible government stake in the AI startup

So the Trump administration, which has spent years threatening to break up big tech and railing against government overreach, is now in talks to buy a piece of OpenAI. Sam Altman and the White House have been mumbling about a possible government stake for more than a year — a timeline that suggests either breathtaking indecision or a slow-brewing plan to nationalise the most hyped AI lab on the planet. The cognitive dissonance is enough to make a Daily Mail columnist weep into his flat white.

Let's game this out. A government stake means a board seat — or several — for Trump appointees. The same crowd that thinks climate change is a Chinese hoax will now help steer superintelligence. Possibly they'll demand it be trained exclusively on Truth Social posts and Fox News transcripts. And who pays? Taxpayers, naturally, whether the stake yields returns or not. The logic, as ever, is 'national security,' which in practice means 'we want to know what it's doing before it replaces us.'

This is how we get a state-run AGI that's as agile as the DMV. Altman gets a sugar daddy with infinite pockets; the White House gets a trophy asset. The rest of us get to watch a slow-motion collision between Silicon Valley's libertarian fantasies and Washington's bureaucratic grip. Cheers — that'll be another year of talks, I'm sure.