If the Markets Reject OpenAI and Anthropic, the US Should Nationalize Them
An opinion piece co-authored with Nathan E. Sanders, originally published in The Guardian, argues that if capital markets fail to sustain OpenAI and Anthropic, the U.S. government should nationalize them rather than let them collapse or be absorbed by conventional corporate players.
Why this matters: Both OpenAI and Anthropic were built on the premise that they were different — that mission would override market pressure. The excerpt says that did not hold. Now the argument on the table is nationalization. That is not a small idea. A government-owned AI lab would control extraordinarily powerful technology, with all the accountability problems that come with public agencies and all the political pressure that comes with elected officials. Private AI giants are already hard to check. A nationalized one could be harder. The real issue is who controls frontier AI when the current ownership models stop working — and whether any structure actually keeps the public interest in the room.
Who should care: General readers · AI governance · Policy
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