This is standard negotiation tactic (alluded to also in the article), suggest a bailout which is the massive over-ask and then walk back to something more reasonable like light touch regulation. OAI says fine no bailout but thanks for the government favours.

This is a stupid take if we are talking about an actual "bailout" and not an oversized "grease the palms of my golfing buddies" grift.

The only relation to a bailout is the amount of money. But OpenAI doesn't have any infrastructure risk or systemic risk. There isn't even an industry collapse risk because if OpenAI collapses Google and open source models will happily soak up their users.

Now I could totally see a "Big Beautiful Bailout" happening, but again, that would just be more grift. A bailout is meant to recoup from a mistake. Throw a trillion at OpenAI and you... increase their runway a couple of years?

There is zero political will in Congress nor Whiteouse to bail them out.

They're fucked.

Wouldn't this get them banned in China, Europe and any future places that the Trump nation wants to piss off?

I'll paste my abridged response to the 'datacenters in space' post:

... It then occurred to me that they (all major AI companies) know all of these facts (uneconomical costs) but still pushing for it so there must be another reason. Then I recalled the offhand statement from the openAI lady about govt backstop for infra, which was strongly opposed by public and AI czar. this might be be a backdoor way of injecting that backstop capital in terms of subsidies now for results in 5 years or so. and needless to say after pilot programs those will fail spectacularly.