Happy 250th America, here's 5% of OpenAI

OpenAI floated giving the Trump admin a 5% stake. Financial Times ran it citing two people familiar with the talks. OpenAI haven't confirmed or denied anything. $852 billion valuation at last count, March 31. That 5% works out to $42.6 billion in paper equity nobody can touch yet. The sequence is what sticks. Six weeks ago NOTUS had senior officials already talking AI equity stakes with major companies. Three weeks ago Commerce spent 18 days reviewing Anthropic's Fable 5 and Mythos 5 before lifting controls. OpenAI in early formal talks now. I'm old enough to remember when tech got regulated by hearing about it on the evening news months later. Now the regulation happens in parallel, while the product is still being built. The Alaska Permanent Fund comparison keeps surfacing — Americans getting a cut of AI returns the way Alaskans get oil dividends. Shows up in secondary reporting and OpenAI's own earlier policy docs on public wealth sharing. Altman may never have said those words in these talks. We don't know that for sure. There were no governance channels for this six months ago. They're being built out of nowhere — equity stake, export controls, model reviews with fixed timelines. Everyone keeps asking whether Washington gets a seat at the table. Nobody asks what happens when they actually show up and talk money.