The Trump administration and Anthropic have not discussed the government taking an equity stake in the AI company, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters on Thursday.
The denial follows a Financial Times report earlier the same day that OpenAI had proposed handing Washington a 5% stake in itself, an arrangement said to potentially extend to Anthropic, Google and Meta as well.
The claim that no talks have occurred rests on an unnamed source, not on an on-record statement from Anthropic itself. Anthropic declined to comment when Reuters asked directly, and both the White House and the Commerce Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment either.
The story that prompted the denial is the more striking one. The Financial Times reported that OpenAI has pitched giving the US government a 5% equity stake, worth roughly $42.6 billion at the company’s $852 billion valuation from its March funding round.
The 💜 of EU techThe latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!The structure under discussion would reportedly involve donating shares, rather than selling them, into a public wealth fund modelled loosely on Alaska’s Permanent Fund, an idea OpenAI first floated in an April policy paper.
