There’s a country of 5.6 million people that has $1.9 trillion. You might have guessed which country I’m talking about, it’s NORWAY.

In the 1960s, Norway found oil in the North Sea. And instead of doing what most countries do.. let corporations extract everything, give a few politicians some nice deals, and move on.. they did something unusual.

They taxed the oil companies heavily. Took the surplus revenue. And parked it into a sovereign wealth fund.

That fund is now worth over $340,000 per Norwegian citizen. It owns small pieces of about 7,200 companies across the planet.

And here's the wild part. It generates more income for Norway than oil itself.

It's one of the greatest economic decisions any country has ever made.

I'm bringing this up because OpenAI just published a policy paper. And the core idea in that paper is basically.. let's do the Norway thing. But for AI.

And I've been thinking about it for a few days now.

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The paper is 13 pages long. It's called "Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age." and I talked about it in my previous article.

And the central argument is something I think most of us would agree with.

AI is going to get really powerful. It's going to automate a lot of work.

When that happens, the wealth generated by AI will concentrate in the hands of a few companies.

And the systems we currently have.. unemployment insurance, social security, welfare.. they were built for a different era. They're not designed to handle what's coming.

So OpenAI proposes a "Public Wealth Fund."

The idea is straightforward. The government and AI companies seed a fund together.

That fund invests in AI-driven growth.. not just in AI companies, but across the broader economy.

And the returns get distributed to every citizen. You don't get a salary.

You get a stake.

Instead of UBI where the government hands you a monthly check, you get ownership in the thing that replaced you.

And when I first read this, I thought.. okay, this is the Norway model. This could actually work.

But then I kept reading. And I started noticing things.

Norway's fund was built by the government. Designed by the government. Managed by the government.

The oil companies didn't get to write the rules. They didn't decide how much to contribute.

They didn't pick where the money went.

The government imposed taxes, took control, and built the fund independently.

What OpenAI is proposing is.. not that.

OpenAI is an AI company writing a paper that says the government should build a fund, that AI companies should help seed, and that should invest in AI-driven growth. Which includes.. companies like OpenAI.

Norway said: we're going to tax you and build this ourselves.

OpenAI is saying: invest in us and we'll share the returns.

That's a very different sentence.

And I sat with that difference for a while. Because it matters.

It doesn't mean the idea is automatically bad. But the dynamic is completely different.

In Norway, the government held the power. In OpenAI's version, the company holds the narrative.

Also a few things that you can't ignore..

OpenAI just converted from a nonprofit to a for-profit company. It closed a $110 billion funding round.

It's preparing for an IPO.

And this paper dropped the same week Congress started gearing up for AI legislation.

I don't think that makes the ideas invalid. But I do think it's worth noticing.

When a company about to go public tells the government to invest in its industry.. that's not just policy. That's also positioning.

After the policy came out, I went through Reddit to see how people were reacting.

But underneath the chaos, there were a few takes that I couldn't stop thinking about.

Someone did the actual math. If you wanted to pay 200 million Americans $20,000 a year from a fund earning 5% returns, you'd need $80 trillion in that fund.

That's more than ten times the US annual budget.

Just process that for a second.

Even if AI creates the biggest economic boom in human history, $80 trillion in a single fund is.. a lot.

And if that fund crashes, everyone depending on it goes down with it. You've basically tied people's ability to eat to the performance of the stock market.

But then someone from Canada made a point I hadn't considered at all.

They said.. countries like Canada don't have their own OpenAI. They don't have their own Google DeepMind.

They can't just "tax the AI companies" because the AI companies aren't there.

For countries outside the US, a sovereign wealth fund might genuinely be the only way to participate in the AI economy.

And that hit different. Because most of the conversation around AI policy is very America-centric.

But AI displacement is going to be global. And not every country will have the option to just tax the companies causing it.

The most uncomfortable take was also the simplest. Someone just said.. none of this matters. The US political system is too broken to implement any of it.

The government is running deficits, cutting programs, and showing zero appetite for expanding anything. You can design the most beautiful policy in the world, but if nobody's going to build it, what's the point?

And honestly? I don't have a good answer to that.

If you've been reading me for a while, you know I try to be fair with these things. I don't dunk on tech companies for clicks.

But I also don't take a policy paper at face value just because it uses the right words.

I think the paper is doing two things at once. And it's important to separate them.

It's raising a question that nobody in power is asking loudly enough. What actually happens to regular people when AI automates a huge chunk of the workforce?

That's a real question. And the fact that an AI company is putting it on paper, publicly, is.. actually useful.

Because governments sure aren't doing it.

But the paper is also positioning OpenAI as the responsible adult in the room. The one saying "we see the risks, we have ideas, work with us."

And that's where I get cautious. Because "work with us" from a company about to IPO doesn't sound like policy. It sounds like a pitch.

The paper talks about shifting taxes from labor to capital. But it doesn't name a rate.

It talks about seeding the fund. But doesn't say how much.

It talks about distributing returns to citizens. But doesn't estimate what those returns would look like.

I went through all thirteen pages looking for a single concrete number. There isn't one.

And I keep coming back to Norway. Because Norway works. It's real. It's proven.

But it works because the government had the political will, the institutional independence, and the courage to tax corporations heavily and keep full control of the fund.

That's the hard part. Not designing the fund.

Building the political conditions where a fund like that can actually exist without being captured by the same companies it's supposed to regulate.

I think the conversation OpenAI started is worth having. I genuinely do.

But I also think we should be honest about the difference between a company that wants to solve a problem.. and a company that wants to be seen solving a problem while also solving its own.

The real safety nets are boring. They look like universal healthcare and affordable housing and education that doesn't bankrupt you.

They've worked in dozens of countries for decades. They don't require superintelligence.

They don't require a wealth fund.

They require political will.

And that.. I think.. is the resource we're actually short on.

What do you think? Is a public wealth fund for AI realistic, or is this the kind of idea that sounds great on paper and dies in reality? I'm genuinely curious where you stand on this.

Let me know. I read everything.

If you made it this far, you're not a casual reader. You actually think about this stuff.

So here's my ask. If this article made you think, even a little, share it with one person. Just one. Someone who's in the AI space. Someone who reads. Someone who would actually sit with these ideas instead of scrolling past them.

That's how this newsletter grows. Not through ads or algorithms. Through you sending it to someone and saying "read this."