OpenAI Proposes Public Wealth Fund, Safety Net Reforms to Address AI Disruption

OpenAI published a 13-page policy document calling for sweeping economic reforms to prepare for what it describes as approaching superintelligence, including taxes on automated labor, a national public wealth fund seeded partly by AI companies, and pilots of a 32-hour working week. The document, formally titled "Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age: Ideas to Keep People First," frames these proposals as a new social contract for an economy facing structural disruption at a scale not seen since industrialization.

Every American would receive an ownership interest in the gains produced by artificial intelligence under one of the document's more sweeping proposals: a nationally managed public wealth fund described as the blueprint's most far-reaching element. The fund is intended to give every citizen a "stake in AI-driven economy growth" regardless of their current investments in financial markets. Alongside it, the blueprint envisions automatic safety-net triggers: when AI-driven displacement metrics hit preset thresholds, benefits including unemployment payments and wage insurance would increase automatically, then phase out when conditions stabilize.

The document also called for taxes "related to automated labor," given AI could reduce the tax base funding programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Social Security, and Medicaid. The blueprint argues that access to AI tools should be treated as a basic public entitlement on par with reading ability or electrical service, with pricing that must not put those tools out of reach for hourly workers, community institutions, or economically marginalized groups.

The document was released as Congress prepares to debate AI legislation. Recent polling suggests a growing number of voters are concerned about how the technology could prompt job losses, raise electricity bills, and change military operations. The document itself frames the policy imperative in terms that echo earlier era reform logic: "industrial policy can play an important role when market forces alone aren't sufficient, when new technologies create opportunities and risks that existing institutions aren't equipped to manage."

CEO Sam Altman told Axios that the scale of change coming from AI is comparable to the Progressive Era and the New Deal, and that the two most immediate dangers are cyberattacks and biological weapons capable of being enabled by advanced AI. Altman called the blueprint "a starting point," not a prescription: "We want to put these things into the conversation."

Critics and analysts cautioned that ambition and implementation are not the same thing. The proposals raise unresolved questions about who would administer a national wealth fund, how displacement thresholds would be defined and audited, and which legislative coalitions could realistically pass any component of the package. The release also landed amid heightened public scrutiny of OpenAI's own corporate governance structure.

Altman was candid about the dual nature of the document: OpenAI is the company racing to build the very technology it is warning about, and positioning itself as the responsible actor proposing solutions is plainly also a strategy to shape regulation before regulation shapes it. Whether Congress, international partners, and the broader tech industry receive OpenAI's framework as a genuine opening bid, or as a regulatory pre-emption play, will define its actual policy legacy.