If you want a direct example of the US subsidising a major AI lab, we can use Microsoft's investment in OpenAI. Microsoft has the largest ownership stake - 27%.

Microsoft did not pay with money - it paid (mostly) with Azure cloud computing credits. MSOFT is then able to write this off as a loss against tax.

It is generally far more tax-efficient in the US to write a loss in this way than it is to write a loss for a cash investment.

In this case, I believe the difference was ultimately highly significant. When including MSOFT eventually writing-off the deprecating Azure hardware it had used to buy the OpenAI equity, the result was MSOFT's tax reduction being either close-to or exceeding the actual cash value of MSOFT's investment in OpenAI - IIRC.

These examples represent taxes that the US chooses not to collect - the US could choose to make investments like these less tax-efficient. Instead, by making them extremely tax-efficient, the US subsidises the transaction hugely.

This is a joke right?

Even ignoring monetary subsidies, there are the non-monetary ones: not being sued into oblivious by the government for their countless hacks of other companies and countries, the slaps on the wrist for massive piracy, the waving of environmental (and other) regulations in order to allow their data centres to be built an operated.

Investors, but also the government in allowing these companies to siphon electricity away passing the increased cost to the consumers

By investors. OpenAI and Anthropic are not profitable (Anthropic is profitable if you allow them to invent what profitability means).

The government, specifically Trump's government and the current money circle in AI inflating American company stocks. In addition to all that American models do not share their papers like Deepseek and Qwen do. So you can literally say Chinese models are doing it for charity at this point.

Capitalistic exploitation against the working classes.

The US regime, which includes the ruling class: the US VCs and megacorps are just as much of an extension of the US regime. They're incredibly intertwined.