Days after President Donald Trump announced the struggling chipmaker Intel has agreed to give the US a 10% stake, White House economic advisor Kevin Hassett said the deal might be the first of others like it.

“The president has made it clear all the way back to the campaign, he thinks that in the end, it would be great if the US could start to build up a sovereign wealth fund,” Hassett told CNBC. “I’m sure that at some point, there’ll be more transactions, if not in this industry then other industries.”

The Intel deal came about because the company received money from the Biden-era CHIPS Act, and Trump wanted to position the federal government to benefit from that funding, he said.

Hassett claimed that Uncle Sam’s partial ownership of Intel does not give the government any say in how the company runs itself, and that there’s also precedent in the US government owning companies, pointing to mortgage financers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as examples. (According to Intel’s 8-K SEC filing, the government is purchasing common stock and will be required to vote its shares as directed by Intel’s board of directors.)

New government investment portfolio? Trump is serious about the US establishing its own sovereign wealth fund. The president issued an executive order in February for the secretaries of Treasury and Commerce to draft a plan for creating one.

What would a potential US sovereign wealth fund look like?—AZ

The IRS has a little more egg on its face. (By now it’s a full-blown omelet.)

The agency is looking to rehire hundreds of audit staff who accepted deferred resignation offers, the Federal News Network reported. In an email to IRS employees, its HR heads stated that staff cuts had “created a potential gap in mission-critical expertise” and that the agency would take steps to solve that problem, “including details, reassignments, DRP/TDRP [Deferred Resignation Program/Treasury Deferred Resignation Program] rescissions, [and] external hiring.”

An IRS employee told FNN that management said during a town hall that the agency had “let too many people go” and that it wanted to “bring back 400 revenue agents and 300 revenue officers who accepted the DRP.” The employee said the IRS planned on “DRP rescissions,” meaning it would contact staff who took DRP offers and ask them to reconsider.

But even bringing back 700 people would be a drop in the bucket. The IRS lost more than 3,600 of its revenue agents, who conduct audits, and more than 600 of its revenue officers, who handle collections, as of this March, a TIGTA report showed. It’s likely that more audit staff have left since then: The IRS’s workforce will decrease by 26% when all the reductions in force are completed, according to the National Taxpayer Advocate.

Their bad?—CV

While most AI agents have been underwhelming so far, KPMG has built one that may ease the collective shudder that comes with the words “tax day.”

So far, most AI agents aren’t the magic wand AI companies have been selling. A study from Carnegie Mellon University showed that the best-performing model completed the intended task just 30.3% of the time. Just a few months ago, Glenn Hopper, head of AI at VAI consulting, told CFO Brew that AI agents “are not ready for primetime” and are still mostly “vaporware.”

But the Australian branch of KPMG is claiming that a 100-page prompt for AI they’ve written can autonomously create tax advice for clients “​​far faster than humans,” tech publication The Register reported.

The company created its own AI bots, using models from all major AI players, including OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Anthropic, and Meta. It fed them as much historical tax advice as it could, along with the Australian tax code, according to The Register.

“It is very efficient. It does what our team used to do in about two weeks, in a day. It will strip through our documents and the legislation and produce a 25-page document for a client as a first draft,” KPMG Chief Digital Officer John Munnelly said at a recent tech summit, The Register reported.

For more on KPMG’s new tax AI, click here.—JK

Oversight is evolving—and with it, the expectations on public companies. This Sept. 16, the former chair of the PCAOB, Erica Y. Williams, brings a powerful perspective on transparency, trust, and the future of corporate accountability. Get ready for insights from the front lines of financial regulation. Register now.