New policy ideas for the Intelligence Age

What happened

OpenAI is awarding grants to 14 projects led by independent organizations to promote economic opportunity and societal resilience as AI advances. The grants follow through on a commitment we made when we published Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age in April 2026: to support others in testing, challenging, and building on the ideas we put forward to ensure that advanced AI benefits everyone.

AI is quickly becoming more capable, with the potential to transform how people learn, create, and participate in the economy. Its reach is also expanding: ChatGPT is used by 1 billion people around the world, across geographies, income levels, and demographic groups. Users span every major age group; we have more adult users both under and over the age of 30 than any other frontier lab.

But broad access to the technology is only part of the equation. Whether AI ultimately serves the many rather than the few will also depend on the choices societies make about how to deploy it and distribute its benefits.

If the benefits of the Intelligence Age are going to be broadly shared, the policy response needs to be as ambitious as the technological change itself—and that means calling for new approaches rather than adjustments to existing policy. These choices should not be made by technology companies alone. In democratic societies, they should be shaped through democratic institutions and public debate.

Independent research and policy organizations play an especially important role: they can develop and test new approaches, challenge assumptions—including ours—and serve as laboratories for ideas that governments can adapt to their own communities and circumstances. Through these new grants, researchers and practitioners will turn high-level ideas into concrete work, examining what could work, what it might cost, and how approaches could be implemented responsibly.

More than 400 people and organizations responded to our call for proposals. Applicants identified an idea and proposed projects that could meaningfully contribute to public understanding and policy development. OpenAI will provide a total of $1 million in funding and up to $1 million in API credits across the selected projects.

American Enterprise Institute: AEI-Urban Bipartisan Commission on Artificial Intelligence and the Future of the American Workforce. The AEI-Urban bipartisan commission will develop low-, moderate-, and high-disruption scenarios for AI’s effects on employment and skills and connect observable indicators of disruption to policy playbooks. Centre for European Policy Studies—Sharing the AI Dividend.

CEPS will examine how AI-driven productivity gains are distributed across workers, firms, sectors, regions, and countries in Europe, benchmarking the EU against the United States. Building on a synthesis of existing empirical evidence, the project will develop innovative policy principles for a renewed European social investment model and adaptive safety nets to ensure that AI-driven prosperity is broadly shared.

The project will deliver a policy study, visualisations, and a stakeholder validation workshop. European Centre for International Political Economy: From Labour to Productive Ownership. ECIPE will examine how broader access to AI and ownership of productive assets could help people participate economically as technology becomes more capable.

The project will develop a practical framework for a “Right to AI” and compare models including employee ownership, citizen investment, pension-based ownership, social wealth funds, and intellectual-property participation. It will produce a final report, shorter insights, and a public webinar. Abundance Institute: Energy Abundance, State by State. Abundance Institute will compare how US states can expand generation and transmission in response to data center demand while producing measurable local benefits.

It will develop a state policy framework, historical analysis, and a public Data Center Atlas policy layer. Progressive Policy Institute: Person-based Benefits in the Age of Information. PPI will design a person-based benefits system covering retirement, health, leave, education, training, and disability across different forms of work.

Why it matters

The projects span the United States, the European Union, Brazil, Singapore, and South Korea and address two broad questions: how AI can broaden economic opportunity, and how societies can build resilience as capabilities advance. Some will produce research and policy models, while others will build prototypes, datasets, and frameworks that can be tested in practice. Summaries of the selected projects are included below.

What to watch

It will prototype “livelihood insurance” triggered by broad changes in an occupation, then identify the legislative and technical changes required to implement the model. Tax Foundation: Tax Policy in the Age of AI. Tax Foundation will analyze how AI adoption could change the balance among labor income, corporate profits, capital gains, and other sources of public revenue.

A final white paper with supporting quantitative analysis will assess taxation options against neutrality, simplicity, transparency, stability, and economic efficiency, explicitly considering innovation, adoption, competition, competitiveness, and fiscal resilience. Windfall Trust: National working groups for AI economic policy.