More than 200 researchers and economists, including 16 Nobel laureates and senior figures from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, have signed a joint statement calling on governments and technology leaders to urgently build the policies and institutions needed to manage the economic disruption artificial intelligence could bring. The statement, titled We Must Act Now: A Statement on AI’s Transformation of the Economy, was released from Stanford, California, and organised by economists Erik Brynjolfsson, Ajay Agrawal, Anton Korinek, and Tom Cunningham.
The statement warns that increasingly capable AI systems could reshape the global economy at a pace with no clear historical precedent, driving a transformation potentially larger than the Industrial Revolution but compressed into a far shorter timeframe. While the signatories acknowledge AI’s potential to significantly improve productivity and living standards, they argue the technology also raises urgent questions for workers, companies, and public institutions that current policy frameworks are not yet equipped to address, particularly around the risk of large scale job displacement.
Anton Korinek, a professor at the University of Virginia currently on leave at Anthropic, said past general purpose technologies such as steam power, electricity, and computers each gave societies decades to gradually adapt, whereas AI may offer only a few years. He argued that governments cannot improvise strategy and institutions in the middle of such a transformation, warning that waiting for greater certainty risks responding only after the disruption has already taken hold. Nobel laureate and New York University professor emeritus Michael Spence said the scale, scope, and speed of recent AI advances, combined with high uncertainty over the timing and magnitude of impacts across the economy, calls for what he described as an all hands on deck approach to steering the technology in beneficial directions.
Nobel laureate and MIT Institute Professor Daron Acemoglu said he was glad to join fellow experts in calling for AI’s risks to be minimised so the technology can work for the benefit of workers and society more broadly, adding that whether AI ultimately raises living standards worldwide or instead concentrates wealth narrowly is not predetermined, but depends on the choices made in how economic systems are restructured around it. The statement’s signatories span a notably broad cross section of the AI and economics community, including OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar, Google DeepMind Chief Scientist Jeff Dean, and Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark, alongside members of Anthropic’s economic research team and Nobel laureate Simon Johnson.
The statement calls for deeper research into AI’s economic effects and urges economists, policymakers, and technology leaders to begin building the institutional frameworks required to ensure the technology complements human capabilities rather than simply displacing workers at scale. Organisers behind the initiative, including Stanford University’s digital economy research community, have framed the statement as a call for new incentives, safeguards, and institutions capable of guiding AI’s economic integration, rather than a specific policy proposal in itself, leaving the detailed work of translating these concerns into concrete regulation and institutional design as the next step for governments and international bodies to take up.
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