The CEOs Volunteering Their Companies for Government Control

In the span of five weeks this summer, three men who run some of the most valuable artificial intelligence companies in the world each volunteered, independently, for the government to take control of their industry. On June 10, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for binding federal regulation of frontier AI models — mandatory testing and a government power to block or reverse the release of models deemed a threat to public safety. ^[1]

Frontier AI models, like airplanes, should be required to go through technical testing and auditing, and their release should be blocked or reversed as a threat to public safety if they do not meet high standards of safety. — Dario Amodei

On July 2, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman proposed giving the U.S. government a 5 percent equity stake in his company, worth roughly $42.6 billion, to create a sovereign wealth fund that would give citizens what he called "a stake and a voice in shaping how that change unfolds." ^[2]

The goal is not only to support people through economic change after decisions have already been made, but to give them a stake and a voice in shaping how that change unfolds. — OpenAI

And by July 12, Palantir CEO Alex Karp had gone furthest of all: full nationalization of the largest AI companies, he said, was "inevitable" within two years. The momentum, he had already warned a month earlier, was not on the industry's side. ^[3]

That fire is going to consume us. — Alex Karpovsky

None of these men is a regulator. None is a politician. Each runs a company whose valuation depends on investors believing the government will stay out. And yet, across a single month, each arrived at the same conclusion: the state was coming for their industry, and the smartest move was to help design the terms. What makes this more than a curiosity is that Washington was already moving in the same direction. Between February and July, the U.S. government pivoted from treating AI as an industry to regulate to treating it as a strategic asset to steer — and it did so through four distinct levers, each of which has advanced in the past six months. The first is equity. Trump called government ownership stakes in AI companies "a beautiful thing" and said taking them was "a distinctly American approach to modern business." His administration is exploring three pathways: exchanging federal funding for equity, accepting taxes payable in stock, or creating a government-backed Public Wealth Fund. ^[4]

where the American people can benefit from the success of AI, the American people will like it better — Donald Trump

The second is a literal kill switch. On July 23, Representatives Ted Lieu and Nathaniel Moran introduced the AI Kill Switch Act, which would give the Department of Homeland Security authority to order AI firms to shut down or rate-limit models during loss-of-control scenarios, with penalties of up to $20 million per violation. Senator Mark Warner has proposed a parallel track: requiring National Security Agency testing before powerful models can be released to the public. ^[5] The third is procurement as coercion. In February, the Pentagon designated Anthropic a "national security supply chain risk" — a label normally reserved for foreign adversaries — after CEO Amodei refused to remove safety guardrails preventing Claude's use for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons. Defense Secretary Hegseth then ordered that no military contractor could do business with Anthropic, even as the military continued using Claude for intelligence and targeting in Iran and Venezuela. ^[6][7] The fourth is export controls. The administration has denied foreign nationals access to Anthropic's most advanced models, treating frontier AI not as a commercial product but as a strategic national asset. The effect was immediate: India, cut off from those models, launched its own sovereign AI initiative. Japan followed, with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang declaring that "Japan cannot outsource its national intelligence." The pattern is now global. ^[8][9][10] These four levers — equity, a kill switch, procurement power, and export controls — did not emerge from a single plan. But together they amount to something that looks less like regulation and more like state architecture. Then there is the thing that makes this moment genuinely unusual in American politics: the convergence is bipartisan. On June 10 — the same day Amodei called for binding regulation — Senator Bernie Sanders introduced the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, which would impose a one-time 50 percent tax, payable in stock, on companies with more than $200 million in AI receipts. His rationale was class justice: AI was built on publicly funded research, and the wealth it generates should, in his words, "guarantee that the trillions of dollars potentially generated by AI are used to improve the lives of all of us." ^[4][3]

The question is who will own and control that future. — Bernie Sanders

Trump arrived at the same mechanism — government ownership of frontier AI — from the opposite direction. His rationale was national competitiveness: the United States should own a piece of its most strategic industry the way a sovereign wealth fund owns a piece of a nation's future. "Taking ownership stakes in private companies," he said, "is actually a distinctly American approach to modern business." ^[4] Two men who agree on almost nothing, proposing two versions of the same idea, for two reasons that do not overlap. That is not a compromise. It is a pincer. The federal government is simultaneously ensuring it will be the sole authority over whatever comes next. The Justice Department joined xAI's lawsuit to block Colorado's state AI law, with Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon declaring that "the Justice Department will not stand on the sidelines while states such as Colorado coerce our nation's technological innovators." The Trump administration has also threatened to restrict federal grants to states that pass their own AI laws. ^[11][12]

Laws that require AI companies to infect their products with woke DEI ideology are illegal. — Harmeet Dhillon

The effect is to consolidate regulatory authority in federal hands at the same moment those hands are reaching for equity, a kill switch, procurement leverage, and export controls. The objections are real and have been stated plainly. Former White House AI czar David Sacks warned Republicans that the frameworks being built now could be weaponized by a future Democratic administration. Michael Bloomberg argued that government ownership would stifle innovation and corrupt regulatory decisions by making the government both regulator and shareholder. Public Citizen's J.B. Branch called the federal preemption of state laws "a failure of leadership that leaves citizens vulnerable," arguing that states must serve as first responders to AI-driven fraud and abuse. ^[3][13][14]

We’re talking about giving back something to the public, and if we do that, the public will become very rich. — Donald Trump

But the objections have not stopped the advance. The kill switch bill was introduced. The administration is exploring equity pathways. Trump has ordered the military to accelerate AI adoption and create an AI National Security Strategic Reserve. ^[5][4][15] What makes this moment almost unique in American politics is not any single lever or any single CEO's statement. It is the convergence itself. The regulated are asking for regulation. The political extremes are meeting at the same mechanism. And there is no coalition opposing it — only scattered voices, each objecting from a different direction, none with the weight to reverse the current. That is why the momentum has not slowed: there is no one slowing it.