More than 200 economists, AI researchers, and Nobel laureates published a statement titled "We Must Act Now" on July 13, calling on governments and technology leaders to urgently create policies and institutions to address the economic effects of artificial intelligence5,6,9.
The statement was signed by 16 Nobel Prize winners, along with computer scientists and executives at Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI. Signatories include OpenAI finance chief Sarah Friar, Google DeepMind chief scientist Jeff Dean, Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark, MIT professors Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson — who won the 2024 Nobel Prize in economics — and AI researcher Yoshua Bengio. Members of Anthropic's economics research team also signed.
The initiative was organized by economists Erik Brynjolfsson, Ajay Agrawal, Anton Korinek, and Tom Cunningham, and published through Stanford University's Digital Economy Lab2.
The letter warns that "AI may become radically more powerful over the next 10 years" and that this "could drive an unprecedented transformation of our economy, larger than the Industrial Revolution, but unfolding over a vastly shorter time frame"8. It identifies both risks — including "large-scale job displacement" — and opportunities such as "major gains in living standards".
"Steam, electricity, and computers each gave societies decades to adapt. AI may give us only a few years," said Anton Korinek, professor at the University of Virginia. "We cannot improvise our strategy and institutions in the middle of the transformation; waiting for certainty means arriving too late". Korinek joined Anthropic's economic research team in March.
The statement calls for deeper research on AI's economic effects and for building the "incentives, guardrails, and institutions needed to steer AI in a direction that complements humans" and benefits society.
Platformer columnist Casey Newton noted that conversations around AI and jobs "can often feel slippery in part because the data we have on the subject is mediocre," with jobs rarely destroyed for any single reason and corporate incentives to obscure the causes of job elimination.
ANALYSIS The letter is notable for uniting figures who often sit on different sides of AI policy debates — lab executives whose companies are building frontier models alongside economists who have raised concerns about labor displacement — under a single call for institutional preparation. The inclusion of senior figures from Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI alongside Nobel-winning economists like Acemoglu, who has been a prominent voice on automation's labor risks, signals a degree of cross-constituency consensus on the need for proactive governance frameworks.
The statement's framing around speed — comparing AI's timeline unfavorably to the decades societies had to adapt to steam, electricity, and computers — centers the argument not on whether AI will be transformative but on whether institutions can respond fast enough.