New Delhi, July 2 -- The question hovering over every major AI company operating in the United States is how long it can scale without Washington deciding to clip its wings. Sam Altman's answer, it now appears, is to make Washington a co-investor instead.

a mechanism through which ordinary Americans would share financially in the AI sector's growth rather than watching its returns accumulate entirely within a small class of technology shareholders.

Altman is also pushing the idea beyond OpenAI's own walls. He has proposed that other leading US AI companies offer equivalent stakes to the government. Whether Anthropic, Google DeepMind, or others would follow is not yet clear. Anthropic has separately explored a concept its team calls a "d...