Policymakers from many nations now view AI as a critical technology, essential to both national security and economic progress. The US has invested heavily in AI research and development as well as in AI infrastructure. Moreover, NSF has created the NAIRR a “concept for a national infrastructure that connects U.S. researchers to computational, data, software, model and training resources they need to participate in AI research.” But the US has not funded a public AI model as the UAE did with Falcon or France did with Bloom. Bruce Schneier argued in a recent piece for Foreign Policy that a “publicly funded LLM could serve as an open platform for innovation, helping any small business, nonprofit, or individual entrepreneur to build AI-assisted applications.” Do we need a public option for AI?