Trump’s Plan to Meet With AI Companies Was News to AI Companies

President Donald Trump said he had a meeting with major artificial intelligence companies on the books to discuss the government acquiring shares in their firms. That was news to the companies, three people familiar with the matter said.

Leading AI companies were blindsided by the president’s announcement last Friday that he would meet with “all the big” firms about taking “pieces” of their companies, “possibly as soon as next week.”

“I actually have a meeting scheduled in the very short, in the very near future, with — did you know that? — all of the companies,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One. “And we’re talking about it, where the American people can benefit from the success of AI.”

The leaders of those companies learned about the meeting from the president’s comments to reporters, according to the three sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private deliberations. As of Monday afternoon, the White House had provided no details about when or where the executives of the leading AI companies would be meeting with the president.

In a statement, a White House official said it continues “to proactively engage across government and industry.”

The confusion about Trump’s meeting announcement highlights the broader uncertainty facing the tech companies after the president suddenly called publicly for their partial nationalization. The proposal for the government to take an equity stake in major AI companies would be among the most consequential federal interventions in the private sector in modern history.

Leading AI firms would stand to lose billions of dollars from forking over public shares to the government, and doing so would raise a raft of novel regulatory, legal and financial challenges that could upend their business models. It’s also not clear if AI companies themselves agree on whether allowing the government to take equity in the industry is a good idea.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman pitched the idea of turning over shares in his company to Trump in early 2025 and discussed the matter again with senior officials in recent weeks, NOTUS first reported. But as of last week, Anthropic had not yet discussed the idea, according to a fourth person familiar with the matter, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity to reflect private talks.

Anthropic’s $900 billion valuation has made it the most valuable AI company in the world and would qualify it as one of the leading AI companies by any measure. Trump claimed on Friday to “have spoken to all of them” about the idea.

Spokespeople for OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX and Google declined to comment.

The president has faced backlash from some of his supporters around the idea of partially nationalizing tech firms. Seeking dominance over China in the race for AI supremacy, the White House has been wary of imposing too many regulatory barriers on the industry, despite widespread alarm in the defense and cyber industries about their potential destabilizing impacts. Becoming a major shareholder in the companies would mark a major reversal of that general administration policy, at least according to some of the president’s most ardent supporters in the tech world.

“Nationalization of AI will accelerate the corporate-government fusion we’re already sliding toward,” said David Sacks, the president’s former AI czar, in a post on X. “... America won’t win the AI race if we beat China but end up with a CCP-style social credit system in the U.S. — and that is the danger as the government becomes more deeply involved in AI development and assumes direct ownership and control.”

Still, the AI companies themselves may have a more difficult time publicly opposing the president if the administration gets serious about the idea. To a greater degree than any recent president, Trump has moved to claim equity shares for the government in a range of American firms — including a 10% share of Intel that the president has extolled — and said that he wants to execute similar deals moving forward. The AI companies are dependent on the federal government for logistical and regulatory support, and resisting Trump’s push to take shares could force them into a confrontation they may prefer to avoid.

“There’s something very interesting about it, where it almost becomes a partnership with the American public,” Trump told reporters. “It would be a beautiful thing.”