More than 200 economists and artificial intelligence researchers, including 16 Nobel laureates and senior figures from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, have called on governments and technology leaders to urgently prepare for the economic consequences of increasingly powerful AI systems.
In a joint statement released on Monday, July 13, the signatories warned that artificial intelligence could trigger an economic transformation even greater than the Industrial Revolution, but one that unfolds over a much shorter period of time.
The initiative, titled “We Must Act Now: A Statement on AI’s Transformation of the Economy," was organized by economists Erik Brynjolfsson, Ajay Agrawal, Anton Korinek and Tom Cunningham. The group argues that while AI offers major opportunities to improve productivity and living standards, it also raises important questions for workers, businesses, and public institutions.
The statement calls for deeper research into AI’s economic effects and urges policymakers to begin developing the institutions and policies needed to ensure the technology complements human capabilities and benefits society as a whole.
“AI capabilities are advancing far faster than our understanding of the economic implications,” said Brynjolfsson, director of Stanford University’s Digital Economy Lab. “We must act now to guide AI to complement humans rather than simply imitate them—and to generate prosperity for the many, not just the few."
Among the signatories are OpenAI chief financial officer Sarah Friar, Google DeepMind chief scientist Jeff Dean, Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark, as well as Nobel laureates Michael Spence, Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson.
The group emphasized the uncertainty surrounding the scale and timing of AI’s impact on the global economy. “The scale, scope, and speed of the advances in AI, combined with a high level of uncertainty about the magnitude and timing of the impacts across many parts of the economy, call for an ‘all hands on deck’ approach,” Spence said.
Anton Korinek, a professor at the University of Virginia who joined Anthropic’s economic research team earlier this year, warned that societies may have little time to adapt.
“Steam, electricity, and computers each gave societies decades to adapt; AI may give us only a few years,” he said. “We cannot improvise our strategy and institutions in the middle of the transformation; waiting for certainty means arriving too late.”
Ajay Agrawal, a professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, argued that the outcome is not predetermined.
“Whether rapidly advancing AI broadly elevates global living standards or severely concentrates wealth is not predetermined; it depends on how we choose to re-architect our political and economic systems today,” he said.
Tom Cunningham, a researcher at METR, summed up the uncertainty facing economists and policymakers: " We are driving in the fog, and it is extraordinarily difficult to anticipate what will happen next."
