Friday Brief: OpenAI Says It Doesn't Want Government Money. Its Lobbyists Tell a Different Story.

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OpenAI Says It Doesn't Want Government Money. Its Lobbyists Tell a Different Story.

Here's what Sam Altman wants you to believe: OpenAI doesn't need government handouts. "We do not have or want government guarantees," he declared on November 6th. Very principled. Very self-reliant.

Here's what OpenAI's lawyers filed with the White House eight days earlier: a request to expand federal manufacturing subsidies to cover "AI server production" and "AI data centers," plus targeted grants and loans for the electrical equipment needed to power their trillion-dollar infrastructure buildout.

So which is it, Sam?

The thing is, OpenAI has a $1.4 trillion spending problem. They've committed to building 30 gigawatts of computing capacity—an absolutely insane amount of infrastructure. To pay for it, they'd need to hit $577 billion in revenue by 2028. That's a 2,900% increase from their current $20 billion run rate. For context, that's more than Google makes. In three years.

The math doesn't math.

So they're playing a clever game. Publicly, they reject "bailouts" and "corporate guarantees"—nobody wants those optics. Privately, they're pushing to expand the Advanced Manufacturing Investment Credit to include AI infrastructure, framing it as "national security" rather than corporate welfare. It's the same language Trump's using in his executive orders on data centers. Convenient, right?

Meanwhile, their entire financing structure is basically financial engineering theater. Nvidia invested $100 billion in OpenAI, which OpenAI immediately spends buying Nvidia chips. For every $10 billion Nvidia puts in, OpenAI commits to spending $35 billion on their hardware. It's a closed loop that looks like investment but functions like vendor financing.

And here's the kicker: while OpenAI's begging for subsidies to fund their trillion-dollar empire, a Chinese startup called Moonshot AI just released a model that beats OpenAI's best work—for $4.6 million.

Not billion. Million.

Kimi K2 Thinking outperformed GPT-5 on humanity's Last Exam (44.9% vs 41.7%) and crushed it on real-world reasoning tasks. They used smarter architecture, released it open-source, and didn't need government guarantees to do it.

So let's recap: OpenAI needs $1.4 trillion, government subsidies dressed up as "national security," and circular financing from chip vendors to stay competitive. Chinese researchers need $5 million and some clever engineering.

What does that tell you about whose business model is actually working?