sbet OpenAI’s Sam Altman to Donate $1 Million to Trump’s Inaugural Fund

OpenAI said on Friday that its chief executive, Sam Altman, was planning to donate $1 million to President-elect Donald J. Trump’s inaugural fund, joining a number of tech companies and executives who are working to improve their relationships with Mr. Trump.

“President Trump will lead our country into the age of A.I., and I am eager to support his efforts to ensure America stays ahead,” Mr. Altman said in a written statement sent to The New York Times.

His planned donation was first reported by Fox News.

Earlier this week, the tech giants Amazon and Meta said they were each putting $1 million into the inaugural fund.

Mr. Trump and Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, have clashed in recent years. Mr. Trump has criticized the Amazon founder over reporting in The Washington Post, which is owned by Mr. Bezos. But more recently, Mr. Bezos has praised Mr. Trump on social media and said he was “very optimistic” about the incoming Trump administration.

“They looked at her like she had four heads,” said Debbie Mesloh, Ms. Harris’s communications director at the time, about her appearance a month later at the district attorneys’ conference in Santa Barbara, a conclave of conservative, throw-the-book-at-them prosecutors.

The idea, briefly floated behind closed doors, seemed to fizzle, and Mr. Trump did not publicly repeat it as experts questioned whether such a model would even be possible. But in the weeks since, Mr. Trump has floated ideas that, taken together, would fundamentally change the way Americans are taxed, eroding the income tax while embracing expansive tariffs as a way to raise federal revenue.

Mr. Trump has long been critical of Meta’s social media platforms, saying they censor conservative viewpoints. But in recent weeks, its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, met with Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago.

Mr. Altman and OpenAI recently hired key executives who previously worked for Democratic administrations.

This summer, OpenAI named Chris Lehane, a lawyer who served in the Clinton White House, as its vice president of global affairs. Its new chief economist, Aaron Chatterji, known as Ronnie, served as a senior economist in President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers and as chief economist at the Commerce Department under President Biden.

The Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December 2023 for copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The companies deny the claims.sbet