Jeff Stein

And so if the suggestion seems to be if they can absorb the shares of the AI companies and maybe redistribute them through a dividend payment, maybe they use them to pay down the debt.

Like there's lots of ways they can use that money.

Then maybe they can.

maintain elite support for the build-out of AI while simultaneously assuring people at the bottom that they're not getting totally screwed by this.

Yeah.

I mean, I think that's the main criticism I've heard, that if the government is a major shareholder in open AI, then the incentives for the government to step in, in the event that open AI has a true bubble bursting economic collapse, that that incentive will be greater.

I think it's a little, I don't know, maybe that is what's going on.

I think

part of my hesitation is that like, if they're just seeding shares, the US investment in this will technically be zero dollars.

It's not like they have an investment to recoup.

But maybe, like, just the fact that the U.S.

government is more part of this company now means that they have a greater incentive to step in.

That makes a degree of sense.

I mean, I think the other major thing that's going on here is that there's a war within the Trump administration over the regulation of AI.

And you have on the one side David Sachs, who left the administration, but he sort of articulates and embodies the idea that there should be essentially no –

Maybe that's an overstatement, but very, very little federal oversight of this industry at all, that it slows down sort of the innovation and that we are in a fierce fight with China and that the best way to win is to not exert really almost any scrutiny over these companies.

And then on the other side, we've seen recently Pete Hegseth and the Department of whatever we're calling it, WAR, is now saying these capabilities are so dangerous to U.S.

national security, as they're framing it, that we need some degree of federal intervention.

Part of what might be going on here is that OpenAI and the other AI companies are saying, well, we're trying to prevent this regulatory onslaught.

If we bring the government in a little bit, maybe they have less of an – if we're generating all this money for the government, they might have less of an incentive to slow down the pace of our growth, which is a little different than the bailout argument, but maybe not that dissimilar in some ways too.