Trump, Sanders, and Altman Walk Into a Room

This week Bernie Sanders, Sam Altman, and Donald Trump all agreed on something. Worth stopping to notice, because it pretty much never happens.

They agree the public should own a piece of AI.

Sanders wants the government to take a 50% stake in companies like OpenAI. Altman wants the public to have equity too, a smaller slice. Trump called it a “partnership with the American public.” AI executives are heading to the White House this week to hash it out.

Every version of the plan has the same shape. A few giant companies stay right where they are, the government holds some shares on your behalf, and someday a fund cuts you in on the upside. In all of them you come out a beneficiary while somebody else stays the owner.

There’s an older idea that works differently.

In the 1930s the power companies decided rural America wasn’t worth wiring. Too few people, too spread out, not enough profit in it. So the farmers wired it themselves. They pooled their money, formed cooperatives, and built the grid the market refused to build. They still own it. Tens of millions of Americans get their electricity from a co-op they’re a member of, today, right now.

That’s the model. A network the people who use it actually own.

Current is a member-owned cooperative for AI compute. You contribute capacity, you accrue patronage, you hold a real share of the thing. The co-op answers to its members, which is to say it answers to you.

Washington spent the week arguing over how big a piece of OpenAI to hold for the public.

We think the public can hold its own.