Depending on who you ask, AI was the financial growth story of 2025. In the first nine months of 2025, spending related to AI accounted for around 38 percent of real GDP growth across the United States, according to analysis by the St. Louis Fed.
Not every economist agrees with that math, but the Trump administration has evidently seen enough to know where they stand. With AI just about only thing propping up an otherwise crumbling economy, fueling a supposed wave of innovation and helping the Pentagon choose who to bomb next, it stands to reason the feds would want to keep the tech on a short leash.
If recent events are any indication, that leash is only getting tighter. Take, for example, the ongoing spat between AI firm Anthropic and the Department of Defense — a struggle that suggests Uncle Sam has stopped asking the tech industry for what it wants, and started taking.
That’s prompted a new round of fears and discussions from AI industry leaders, some of whom aren’t pulling any punches about the looming threat of nationalization.
Palantir CEO Alex Karp, for example, had some pretty harsh criticism for his industry colleagues at OpenAI and ChatGPT: “If Silicon Valley believes we’re going to take everyone’s white collar jobs… and [say] ‘screw the military’… If you don’t think that’s going to lead to the nationalization of our technology — you’re ret***ed,” he mused at the recent a16z summit, underscoring his point with a slur against people with disabilities.
“Good point,” xAI founder Elon Musk chimed in on social media.
Over the weekend, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman opined that, in the long-term, the threat of nationalization is to be expected. “It has seemed to me for a long time it might be better if building AGI [artificial general intelligence] were a government project,” he said.
“I obviously don’t know,” Altman continued, adding that he has “thought about it of course… it doesn’t seem super likely on the current trajectory.”
On a recent episode of the Hard Fork podcast, hosts Casey Newton and Kevin Roose explored the implications of nationalization and AI industry leaders’ attitudes on the matter.
“Some people who I consider quite serious and credible have been talking about this threat of nationalization for several years now,” Roose said. “So I guess my worry… is that we are living through an early dress rehearsal for what something like nationalization of the AI companies could look and feel like.”
“[Altman] does not want the United States government to come in and nationalize the AI companies, at least not right now,” Newton concurred. “And so maybe if OpenAI could reach some sort of agreement that would provide at least some protections for Americans and other AI companies would sign on to it, that would just release the pressure on the industry overall.”
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