President Donald Trump said on Friday that he’s spoken to AI companies about striking deals “where the American people can benefit from the success of AI.”

Trump does not seem to have mentioned specific companies in his comments, but OpenAI is a likely candidate, especially after CNBC reported that the Trump administration has indeed been discussing an equity stake with the AI company.

CNBC said some of that equity could be used to seed a “Public Wealth Fund” recently proposed by OpenAI. As outlined by the company, proceeds from the fund “could be distributed directly to citizens, allowing more people to participate directly in the upside of AI-driven growth, regardless of their starting wealth or access to capital.”

According to Bloomberg, when reporters on Air Force One asked Trump about the idea, he replied that he’s been talking to AI executives about “concepts where pieces could be given to the American public, where the American public essentially becomes a partner with the companies.”

Bloomberg also reports that CEO Sam Altman has been discussing the idea of a government stake in major AI companies since early 2025.

This seems to align with Trump’s broader interest in government ownership of for-profit companies — most notably, with the government taking a 10% stake in struggling chipmaker Intel last year.

The idea has also found some traction on the left, with Senator Bernie Sanders this week proposing a one-time, 50% tax that companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI (which is part of SpaceX) would pay in the form of stock.

With all of those businesses potentially going public this year, Sanders argued this tax would “give the public a direct role in determining the future of this technology” and “guarantee that the trillions of dollars potentially generated by A.I. are used to improve the lives of all of us.”

David Sacks, an investor and podcaster who recently stepped down from his role as Trump’s AI and crypto czar, posted that he can see why Sanders’ idea resonates, “including with many on the right,” but warned it would actually “accelerate the corporate-government fusion we’re already sliding toward.” (Sacks now co-chairs the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.)

Elsewhere on social media, former Microsoft employee Dare Obasanjo suggested, “The groundwork is already being laid for a government bailout of OpenAI.”

TL;DR

Salesforce’s stake in Anthropic is now worth approximately $5 billion after investing since early 2023, representing roughly two-thirds of its entire strategic portfolio. The return comes as Anthropic files confidentially for an IPO at a $965 billion valuation.

Salesforce has a stake in Anthropic worth approximately $5 billion after investing repeatedly in the Claude developer since early 2023, Bloomberg reported on Monday. The software company first participated in Anthropic’s fundraising with roughly $50 million and has continued investing in every subsequent round. With Anthropic’s confidential IPO filing also landing on Monday, Salesforce is positioned to realise one of the largest venture-style returns in enterprise software history.

The scale of the return becomes clearer in portfolio context. Salesforce’s total strategic investments across hundreds of companies were valued at $7.8 billion at the end of April, according to SEC filings. That figure predates Anthropic’s latest $65 billion funding round, which valued the company at $965 billion and more than doubled its previous valuation. After the revaluation, the Anthropic stake alone represents roughly two-thirds of Salesforce’s entire strategic investment portfolio.

The early bet

Salesforce Ventures acknowledged in a February blog post that the initial investment was not a consensus trade. “In 2023, betting on a research-heavy startup at a meaningful valuation was not obvious, given there was no market precedent of AI research turning into commercial success,” the firm wrote. Anthropic’s models now power AI features across Salesforce’s product suite, including Slack, and CEO Marc Benioff has said Salesforce will spend $300 million on Anthropic tokens in 2026.

The investment structure gives Salesforce a double exposure. It is both an investor capturing Anthropic’s valuation gains and a customer embedding Anthropic’s models into its own products, including the Agentforce AI agent platform that reached $1.2 billion in annual recurring revenue last quarter. As enterprise AI spending shifts toward agentic platforms, Salesforce benefits regardless of whether its own AI products or Anthropic’s underlying models capture more of the value.

Not the only windfall

Salesforce is not the only company reaping outsized returns from early Anthropic bets. Zoom invested approximately $51 million in Anthropic’s Series C in May 2023 through its Zoom Ventures arm. That stake is now worth approximately $1.3 billion, a roughly 25x return in three years. Accel, which invested in Anthropic’s Series G, has seen its stake more than quadruple in months as the company’s valuation surged past OpenAI’s.

The returns reflect a dynamic that has become defining in the current AI cycle: a small number of model providers, primarily Anthropic and OpenAI, are capturing an extraordinary share of both venture capital and unrealised gains. For Salesforce, the $5 billion Anthropic stake has appreciated more than the combined market capitalisation gains of many of its software acquisitions.

The risks ahead

The $5 billion valuation is on paper until Anthropic’s IPO provides a public market price. Anthropic’s ongoing legal dispute with the Pentagon, which designated the company a supply-chain risk after it refused to grant the military unrestricted model access, represents a material overhang. Anthropic has said the designation could jeopardise billions in revenue.

For Salesforce specifically, the concentration of its strategic portfolio in a single company creates exposure that investors will scrutinise. If Anthropic’s IPO prices below the $965 billion private valuation, or if the stock declines post-listing, the mark-to-market impact on Salesforce’s balance sheet would be significant. Salesforce itself announced the acquisition of Contentful on the same day, continuing a heavy spending pace that has kept its own stock under pressure for months.

But the strategic logic of the original bet has been validated. Salesforce invested in Anthropic before the market had consensus that AI research labs could become commercial businesses. Three years later, Anthropic is filing for a public listing at a valuation approaching $1 trillion, and the $50 million that started the relationship has grown roughly 100-fold.