In Washington, the Stake Comes After the Blacklist

"I might. Maybe I could do that. I have many deals like that." That was Donald Trump's answer at the White House on Monday 28 September, when TIME asked whether the US government would take stakes in OpenAI and Anthropic. Asked whether he meant to nationalise the labs, he said "No." Then he listed his precedents. The first was the 9.9% of Intel, which by his own count has made "60 or 70 billion". The second was a conversation with Jensen Huang, whom he says he told that Nvidia would not sell certain chips "unless he gave the United States of America a cut." That cut is real. Since August 2025 Nvidia and AMD have paid the federal government 15% of their revenue on chips sold in China, in exchange for the export licence.

I want to dwell on the order of events, because it has changed. In July it was OpenAI offering Washington 5% of itself, and I wrote that a share is not a say: a passive stake with no board seat, good for calming the regulator. This time the state already has the say, and the share comes after. First the say, then the share. The export licence, the list of excluded suppliers and the permission to sell to a federal agency are all switches in the executive's hands. Each one, once released, can become a line on a balance sheet.

Anthropic's timeline shows this better than any theory. On 27 February the Pentagon, which this administration also calls the Department of War, designated Anthropic a "supply chain risk". The label was designed for suppliers from adversary countries such as Huawei. Defence contractors must certify that they do not use Claude, and federal agencies were given six months to stop. It started with a refusal: Anthropic would not drop the limits that bar its models from mass surveillance of US residents and from autonomous weapons without human control. Trump called the company "Leftwing nut jobs". In June came export controls on Fable 5 and Mythos 5. On 25 September a federal appeals court in Washington upheld the designation by two votes to one. On the 27th Dario Amodei spent two and a half hours at dinner with the president in the White House. On the 28th, in the interview, Trump said that Amodei's views are "much different" from how the press portrays them, and that "he understands". The same day Reuters was reading the prospectus for the listing, which counts those very government decisions among its risks: "material revenue losses or business disruptions." The investor day is set for 14 October, with the listing in mid-November.

Government work accounts for less than 1% of Anthropic's revenue. The damage from the blacklist lies with customers who also work for the military and would rather have a supplier without the mark. A company about to ask the market for a valuation close to two trillion dollars has every reason to be rid of it, far more than any federal contract is worth.

Anthropic and the administration deny having discussed a stake, and I take the denial at its word. The simplest reading of the sequence, which I offer as a hypothesis, is that a détente is being negotiated, and that détentes with this White House come with a price list. One item is already on it. On 23 August Anthropic signed a $13.7 billion compute contract over six years with RUM Group, for a data centre in Maysville, Georgia. RUM is the group behind Rumble, the platform that hosts Truth Social's infrastructure and counted Peter Thiel and JD Vance among its early investors. Under the deal Anthropic receives warrants for about 50.8 million RUM shares at one cent each. The symmetry is almost a textbook case: the lab takes a stake in a company close to the president while the president weighs taking one in the lab.

Of course, a state asking for a share of the return from whoever exploits something public has respectable precedents, from Norway's oil fund to the Alaska Permanent Fund. I have written myself that a public fund for AI is a sensible idea. Nvidia's 15% pays for something else, though: a permission. Anyone who has written an access-control system recognises the pattern. The check should return yes or no, according to a rule known before the request. Here it returns a price, and you learn the rule over dinner.

From old Europe this story reads with a very practical interest. The tools we use to write code, review contracts and prepare a bid are almost all from the US, and their availability now depends on switches that carry a tariff in Washington. Anthropic was put on the list for keeping two limits, on surveillance and on weapons. If the détente comes, three things are worth watching:

whether the Pentagon designation falls before 14 October;

whether an agreement with the government appears in the final prospectus;

whether those two limits stay written into the usage policy as before.

First the say, then the share. What remains to be seen is which of the two gave something up.