No way the US is going to nationalize a tech company regardless of what happens. The exodus of capital would be unimaginable.

> "No way the US is going to nationalize a tech company regardless of what happens. The exodus of capital would be unimaginable."

You simply cannot apply any sort of actual logic to the reasoning of the current U.S. government's actions... They just "do stuff" because they feel like it, with no clear thought whatsoever of any potential consequences that may occur.

It's Madman theory all the way down.

> "No way the US is going to tariff the entire world regardless of what happens. The exodus of capital would be unimaginable."

The CEO of Anthropic himself has said AI is like a nuclear bomb when justifying export controls on Nvidia chips. How many private companies control nuclear bombs?

> Trump says his team will 'look into' US taking stake in AI companies[1]

Yes, there is a gap between "taking a stake" and nationalizing one, but..

[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/trump-says-his-team-will-lo...

They took 10% of Intel and the only reaction was my stocks increasing in value 5x.

Taking a 10% stake in a company is far from nationalization. And the big increase in Intel's stock price happened months after that.

It is literally partially nationalising though, isn’t it?

This is how the UK government got the banks through the 2008 financial crisis.

They bought the shares on the open market. They didn't seize the company at gunpoint.

So if USgov bought 51% at market value you’d be ok with that?

Time to fire up the printers I guess.

No they didn’t. After Trump started making noise about their CEO, Lip-bu Tan, being Chinese they then took the shares at a “…discount to the current market price.”[1]

And the money for this _deal_ was primarily from the CHIPS act funds they were already awarded but had not been sent to them yet

> Of the total, $5.7 billion of the government funds will come from grants under the CHIPS Act that had been awarded but not paid, and $3.2 billion will come from separate government awards under a program to make secure chips.[1]

This was at gunpoint from the government’s monopoly on violence.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/22/intel-goverment-equity-stake...

???

The government had passed a law appropriating funds to subsidize semiconductor manufacturing in the US and spent some of it buying intel stock. How is that the government seizing Intel at gunpoint? I mean aside from the libertarian argument that the taxation necessary to raise those funds is theft?

Did you miss the part where it was already awarded to them, but the Trump admin then made it conditional?

Why would you think nationalising is a violent process?

As soon as the nation owns enough stock to profit from government decisions (and to compound the influence of those decisions) you essentially have a partially nationalised business.

10% of OpenAI might easily be enough to reach a meaningful "partially nationalised" threshold, once you factor in any holdings in federal pension plans and the active level of government policymaking.

It is very clear Sam Altman wants this, too, because this whole "take 10%" thing in Trump's mind was his idea back in early 2025, and OpenAI have been following up on it recently.

They want the US government to be the bag holder.

Taking any % is partially nationalizing it and there was no negative capital flight. And 10% is a pretty significant portion.

Trump has already (with Altman directly egging him on) talked about the US taking a share in (i.e. partially nationalising) the AI companies. Has he not called a meeting about this next week?