Nathaniel Whittemore

Now, that language of voluntarily ceding makes it a little unclear whether the government would pay for the shares.

And sources also state that Anthropic is not involved in discussions about providing equity at this time.

Now for those of you with one eye raised on the sourcing, Notice is a relatively new publication but has extremely strong credibility, founded by Politico reporter Robert Albatron.

Former Washington Post reporter Jeff Stein is the lead journalist on this story, and Stein is generally considered to be one of the most well-sourced and highly regarded journalists in Washington.

Now, overall, while some of this is fairly dramatic, it's also not entirely unexpected.

This administration has floated the idea of building a sovereign wealth fund and taken steps towards it by acquiring minority stakes in numerous companies, including Intel.

It's also not, as we saw earlier this week, entirely novel thinking in Washington, with Bernie Sanders floating the idea of the government taking a 50% stake in AI companies through a one-time tax earlier this week.

The idea has made for some strange political bedfellows, with figures on the populist right finding themselves aligning pretty closely with Sanders.

Responding to the Sanders proposal, Steve Bannon said this week, You can smell the stench of desperation emanating from the oligarchs as they run heedlessly to a public market takeout.

We should not take tip money but force them to cough up 50% of the equity, to be dispersed to American citizens.

The horseshoe theory of American politics is well and truly intact.

Now, in terms of the public reaction, a lot of folks just question simply why taxation wasn't the right way to do this.

Georgetown law professor Peter Harrell writes, the government should tax and regulate them and potentially distribute the taxes as a dividend, but ownership risks giving the government control outside of public view and potentially the wrong incentives.

Bobak McGuffin writes, what if they set up some system where the company sent a certain percentage of their profits to the federal government every year in quarterly installments and

Maybe the states could also choose to tax the companies if they operate in that state.

Joel Griffith was more blunt, writing, "...more quote-unquote capitalism, but with Chinese Communist Party characteristics.

Brought to you not by AOC and Bernie Sanders, but by the current United States President."

Even Axios business editor Dan Primack wrote, "...this is basically the Bernie proposal.

Really never expected that electing Trump would push the U.S.

government so far towards actual socialism.