A guest post published on February 5, 2026, argues that the Norwegian Government Pension Fund Global (GPF-G) should purchase OpenAI and manage it for the benefit of the international community. The proposal, written by Zachary Jones, comes amid rising concerns about the concentration of power and wealth in artificial intelligence.
Jones argues that AI capabilities are advancing faster than institutional response. He warns that a transformative technology will crash into the capitalist political economy, presenting risks to survival, autonomy, and democratic order. The piece calls for policy proposals that push the boundaries of plausibility.
A Fund Big Enough to Buy OpenAI
The GPF-G is valued at over $2 trillion, making the purchase financially feasible. OpenAI's valuation hovers around $800 billion. That gap leaves room for negotiation, but the numbers still strain the imagination.
Norges Bank Investment Management, which manages the fund, would have to liquidate 40% of its portfolio to fund the purchase. That is a massive repositioning for a sovereign wealth fund built on oil revenues. Jones acknowledges the practical difficulty but argues the scale of the AI transition demands bold action.
OpenAI was formerly a non-profit with capped profits and a windfall clause. That clause guaranteed that an intelligence explosion would benefit all humanity. The California Attorney General recently approved OpenAI's transformation into a for-profit corporation, scrapping those non-profit commitments. Jones describes this as an impossibly deep loss for the human community.
Why Norway?
Norway is one of the world's most stable democracies. The country consistently meets or exceeds the UN target of 0.7% of GNI for foreign aid, often reaching 1%. That record underpins Jones's claim that Norway has a moral commitment to cosmopolitanism not shared by a private corporation or the Republican Party.
Norway has mediated conflicts in the Middle East, Sri Lanka, and Colombia. It hosts the Nobel Peace Prize. It houses the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a backup of the world's agricultural biodiversity. Jones points to these as examples of Norway's cosmopolitan trust for humanity.
"My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law," Jones writes. That sentiment frames the entire proposal.
The GPF-G has also divested from several Israeli firms collaborating with the occupation of Palestinian territories. That move signals a willingness to act on moral principles, even at financial cost.
The Case Against Private AI Ownership
Jones argues that AI models are derivative works of collective human effort. They are trained on vast quantities of text, images, and code scraped from the internet and digitized archives. Publicly-funded infrastructure, including the internet, universities, government grants, and public datasets, made this possible. DARPA funding seeded neural network research. Public universities trained AI PhDs.
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This is a commons being enclosed, Jones argues. The gains from AI are concentrated into a small class of shareholders. Silicon Valley talks of a "Permanent Underclass." Automation of most, then all jobs, will cause an unprecedented crisis of technological unemployment.
AI companies lack interest in the welfare of humanity as a whole. They have resisted pressure from civil society and government to abide by safety standards. They recognize the potential for catastrophic risks. The default trajectory, Jones writes, is extreme concentration of benefits but socialized risks.
A Proposal for International Stewardship
Jones proposes transferring management of OpenAI to an international multilateral institution after the takeover. That would remove the company from private control and place it under a governance structure accountable to humanity.
The US government would clearly block such an intervention. Jones acknowledges this obstacle directly. He suggests leaving the option open for a future administration if Congress refuses to bring labs into public hands.
He also notes that if the Nobel Peace Prize Committee awards Trump, perhaps there will be an opening of political possibility. That reference ties back to Norway's role as host of the prize.
Jones criticizes proposals to ban data center construction as reflexive and naive localism. He argues that such measures do not address the underlying ownership problem. The gap between the magnitude of the AI transition and the policy imagination of the left is impossibly vast, he writes.
The Overton Window Problem
The Overton Window on AI governance is narrow to the point of absurdity, Jones argues. Mainstream policy debates rarely question who owns the systems. If ownership structures are not changed, the default future is disempowerment of the vast majority of the human population.
The article is an opinion piece advocating for a specific policy proposal. It critiques existing AI governance and leftist policy responses. It argues for public ownership of AI labs as a solution to concentration of power.
Jones uses Norway's social democratic credentials as a basis for trust. He acknowledges practical obstacles, including US opposition and mandate violations, but argues for flexibility.
The proposal is unlikely to become policy anytime soon. The US government would almost certainly block a foreign sovereign wealth fund from acquiring one of its most strategic companies. But Jones's argument is not about immediate feasibility. It is about expanding what is considered possible.