OpenAI said its nonprofit arm, the OpenAI Foundation, will commit an initial $250 million towards research, grants, pilot programmes, and partnerships focused on managing AI-driven economic disruption and labour-market changes.
The initiative will focus on measuring AI’s economic effects, supporting workers during transitions, and developing long-term economic security systems.
The AI company said the funding will support organisations through grants and institutional partnerships, while the Foundation also builds internal research and policy programmes.
OpenAI said existing economic systems are poorly equipped to measure how AI-generated value will be distributed if gains shift away from wages and towards digital goods, lower-cost services, or capital owners. “A central question is not only what AI can do, but where that value accrues,” the company said.
It wants to fund updated labour-market infrastructure similar to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics and O*NET systems to better track employment shifts, wages, firm behaviour, and changing job structures as AI systems become more capable.
OpenAI also said current automation studies often fail to capture how firms reorganise work or how AI may create labour-complementary roles alongside displacement.
A part of the initiative will focus on low and middle-income countries, where the company believes AI could expand access to expertise, public services, and economic mobility. It is also set to focus on region-specific infrastructure and local deployment models rather than standardised global approaches.
The company, which is preparing to go public, also said it may fund experiments involving access to unemployment insurance, wage-loss insurance, job-transition assistance, and worker retraining programmes, while acknowledging that traditional retraining efforts have produced mixed results.
OpenAI’s proposal also includes research into sovereign wealth funds, taxation tied to capital and economic rents, windfall-profit systems, and adaptive fiscal policies tied to indicators such as labour-share declines or concentrated AI gains.
Another part of the initiative focuses on simulation and forecasting infrastructure. OpenAI said it wants to support “multi-agent economic simulations that use AI to model how economies might evolve as capabilities improve.”
The announcement expands the role of the OpenAI Foundation beyond its earlier focus on AI governance, education, healthcare, and democratic participation. The Foundation was introduced earlier this year as part of OpenAI’s broader public-interest initiatives, separate from its commercial operations.
Other frontier AI companies have also increased work around economic forecasting and public-sector planning tied to AI deployment.
Anthropic has expanded research into labour-market effects and governance frameworks for advanced AI systems, while Google DeepMind has increased work on AI-enabled economic modelling and simulation systems.
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