Norway Should Buy OpenAI
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- OpenAI's former non-profit structure with capped profits and a windfall clause was scrapped when the California Attorney General approved its transformation into a for-profit corporation
- Norway's Government Pension Fund Global (valued over $2 trillion) is proposed to acquire OpenAI (valued around $800 billion) and return the lab to public ownership
- Acquiring OpenAI would require Norges Bank Investment Management to liquidate 40% of its portfolio and violate the fund's own mandate
- The essay argues large language models are derivative works trained on DARPA-funded neural network research, public universities, and public datasets — calling AI 'a commons being enclosed'
- Norway consistently exceeds the UN 0.7% GNI foreign aid target (often reaching 1%) and hosts the Nobel Peace Prize and Svalbard Global Seed Vault
- The GPF-G previously divested from Israeli firms over Palestinian occupation collaboration, and the author concedes the US government would likely block any such acquisition
Why it matters: The acquisition would cost roughly $800 billion — about 40% of Norway's sovereign wealth fund — and would violate the fund's own investment mandate, while facing likely US government opposition. The proposal frames AI as a public commons whose benefits should not remain concentrated among a small class of shareholders.
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