Trump says his team will 'look into' US taking stake in AI companies

WASHINGTON, June 5 (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump told reporters on Friday that his team is looking into the idea of AI companies giving the American public a stake in their firms, adding that he planned to host a meeting with AI executives as soon as next week. 

  “There’s something very interesting about it, where it almost becomes a partnership with the American public,” he told reporters aboard Air Force One. “We’ll look into that.”

Digital news outlet NOTUS reported on Thursday that senior U.S. officials held preliminary discussions with AI companies about the potential for the government to buy some shares in their firms.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on details of the planned meeting, or whether topics would include the possibility of the U.S. government taking stakes in the firms.

AI giants Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Facebook and SpaceX did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The Trump administration has been struggling to decide how tightly to regulate AI.

The White House abruptly cancelled a signing ceremony for an AI executive order that had been slated for May 21. Other media outlets reported the cancellation came after the tech industry pushed back against elements of the directive.

At the time, Trump said he did not like certain aspects of the executive order and did not want to take any steps that might undermine the U.S. in its AI competition with China.

But earlier this week, Trump signed a revamped version of the order that asked leading AI developers to voluntarily submit their most capable models for government cybersecurity tests before ‌releasing them to the public.

Fears about AI are mounting, fuelled by Anthropic’s release of its powerful Mythos tool. In the wrong hands, experts say, Mythos could dramatically accelerate sophisticated cyberattacks, particularly in sectors such as banking that rely on complex, interconnected and often decades-old technology systems.

The Trump administration has taken an unusually large role in the U.S. corporate sector, taking stakes in U.S. chipmaker Intel and a handful of rare earth and quantum companies.

(Reporting by Nandita Bose and Humeyra Pamuk, Courtney Rozen and Alexandra AlperEditing by David Ljunggren, Chizu Nomiyama and Nia Williams)

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