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We Must Act Now – A Statement on AI's Transformation of the Economy

A group of prominent economists, policymakers, and technology leaders, including Nobel laureates and former government officials, issued a statement warning that AI could transform the economy faster than the Industrial Revolution, bringing both risks like job displacement and opportunities for higher living standards. They called for urgent action to understand the economics of transformative AI and to build incentives, guardrails, and institutions to steer AI toward benefiting society.

read6 min views2 publishedJul 13, 2026

We Must Act Now

A Statement on AI’s Transformation of the Economy #

**AI may become radically more powerful over the next 10 years.****This could drive an unprecedented transformation of our economy, larger than the Industrial Revolution, but unfolding over a vastly shorter time frame. It could bring risks, including large-scale job displacement, as well as opportunities such as major gains in living standards.**Economists, policymakers and technology leaders must act now to understand the economics of transformative AI and to build the incentives, guardrails, and institutions needed to steer AI in a direction that complements humans and benefits society.

Signatories #

Erik Brynjolfsson, Stanford University

Ajay Agrawal, University of Toronto

Anton Korinek, University of Virginia and Anthropic

Tom Cunningham, METR

Michael Spence, New York University*

Daron Acemoglu, MIT*

Diane Coyle, University of Cambridge

Chad Jones, Stanford University

David Autor, MIT

Joseph Stiglitz, Columbia University*

Niall Ferguson, Stanford University

Jason Furman, Harvard University

Simon Johnson, MIT*

Christopher A. Pissarides, London School of Economics*

Paul Milgrom, Stanford University*

George Akerlof, Georgetown University and University of California, Berkeley*

Philippe Aghion, INSEAD*

Dan Hendrycks, Center for AI Safety

Eric Schmidt, Former CEO of Google

Peter Howitt, Brown University*

Oliver D. Hart, Harvard University*

Bengt Holmstrom, MIT*

Alvin Roth, Stanford University*

Michael Kremer, University of Chicago*

Roger B. Myerson, University of Chicago*

Paul Krugman, Graduate Center of the City University of New York*

Ben Bernanke, Brookings Institution*

Pascual Restrepo, Yale University

Jaan Tallinn, University of Cambridge

Daniel Susskind, Gresham College

Yoshua Bengio, Université de Montréal, LawZero and Mila

Gillian Hadfield, Johns Hopkins University

Raffaella Sadun, Harvard Business School

Tyler Cowen, George Mason University

Reid Hoffman, Greylock

Wojciech Zaremba, OpenAI Foundation

David J. Deming, Harvard University

Jack Clark, Anthropic

Ronnie Chatterji, OpenAI

Dean Ball, OpenAI

Jeff Dean, Google

Joshua Gans, University of Toronto

Abhishek Nagaraj, University of California, Berkeley

Jeffrey Sachs, Columbia University

Peter McCrory, Anthropic

Alex Imas, University of Chicago

Stephanie Bell, Partnership on AI

Rebecca Finlay, Partnership on AI

Gina Raimondo, RAISE US

Yann LeCun, Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs

John McHale, University of Galway

Oskar Nordström Skans, Uppsala University

Ebehi Iyoha, Harvard Business School

Kevin Bryan, University of Toronto

Judy Chevalier, Yale University

Shannon Liu, University of Toronto

Shai Bernstein, Harvard Business School

Alexander Oettl, Emory University

Benjamin Jones, Northwestern University

Scott Stern, MIT

Hong Luo, University of Toronto

Amir Sariri, Purdue University

John List, University of Chicago

Rebecca Henderson, Harvard Business School

Ben Weidmann, University College London

Kristina McElheran, University of Toronto

Basil Halperin, University of Virginia

Christian Catalini, MIT

Rembrand Koning, Harvard Business School

Lee Lockwood, University of Virginia

Daniel Trefler, University of Toronto

Annie Liang, Northwestern University

Anders Humlum, University of Chicago

Jonathan Colmer, University of Virginia

Maria del Rio-Chanona, University College London

Janice Stein, University of Toronto

David Yanagizawa-Drott, University of Zurich

Frank Neffke, Complexity Science Hub

Eva Vivalt, University of Toronto

Doh-Shin Jeon, Toulouse School of Economics

Adam Posen, Peterson Institute for International Economics

Jakub Growiec, SGH Warsaw School of Economics

David Hémous, University of Zurich

Elliott Ash, ETH Zurich

Klaus Prettner, Vienna University of Economics and Business

Donghyun Suh, Bank of Korea

Benjamin Moll, London School of Economics

Philipp Schmidt-Dengler, University of Vienna

Olivier Blanchard, Peterson Institute for International Economics

Emilio Calvano, LUISS University of Rome

John Van Reenen, London School of Economics

Maryam Farboodi, Cornell University

Sholto Douglas, Anthropic

John Schulman, Thinking Machines

Martin Beraja, University of California, Berkeley

John Fernald, INSEAD

Boaz Barak, Harvard University and OpenAI

Arnaud Costinot, MIT

Noam Brown, OpenAI

Anna Salomons, Tilburg University and Utrecht University

Olivier Jeanne, Johns Hopkins University

Neil Thompson, MIT

Simone Daniotti, Utrecht University

Jerry Yang, AME Cloud Ventures

Leonardo Gambacorta, Centre for Economic Policy Research

Daniel Kokotajlo, AI Futures Project

Michiel Bakker, MIT and Google DeepMind

Manuel Trajtenberg, Tel Aviv University

Giacomo Calzolari, European University Institute

Jeff Wilke, Re:Build Manufacturing

Jacques Crémer, Toulouse School of Economics

Danny Yagan, University of California, Berkeley

Beatrice Weder di Mauro, Centre for Economic Policy Research

Max Tegmark, MIT

Vinod Khosla, Khosla Ventures

Benjamin Shiller, Brandeis University

Oren Etzioni, University of Washington

Martin Ford

Oded Galor, Brown University

Sarah Friar, OpenAI

Marc L. Busch, Georgetown University

Walid Hejazi, University of Toronto

Dilip Soman, University of Toronto

John Danaher, University of Galway

Thomas Astebro, HEC Paris

Alex Tabarrok, George Mason University

Alberto Galasso, University of Toronto

Alfonso Gambardella, Bocconi University

Reza Satchu, Harvard Business School

Alex Whalley, University of Calgary

Tom Davidson, Forethought Center for AI Strategy

Laurina Zhang, Boston University

Andrew Scott, University of Oxford

Jean-Etienne de Bettignies, Queen's University

Sam Manning, GovAI

Joel Blit, University of Waterloo

Sampsa Samila, IESE Business School

Roshni Raveendhran, University of Virginia

Liz Lyons, University of California, San Diego

Ramana Nanda, Imperial College London

Marianne Bertrand, University of Chicago

Arnaldo Camuffo, Bocconi University

Maxim Massenkoff, Anthropic

Petra Moser, New York University

Shivaji Sondhi, University of Oxford and Princeton University

Danny Buerkli, Windfall Trust

Carles Boix, Princeton University

Anna Yelizarova, Windfall Trust

Ken Ono, Axiom Math and University of Virginia

Isaiah Andrews, MIT

Anders Sandberg, University of Oxford

Martin Chorzempa, Peterson Institute for International Economics

Gita Gopinath, Harvard University

Zoë Hitzig, Anthropic

Lawrence Katz, Harvard University

Nathan Wilmers, Anthropic

Sebastian Becker, HEC Paris

Markus K. Brunnermeier, Princeton University

Sebastian Mallaby, Council on Foreign Relations

Adrian Brown, Windfall Trust

Sonia Sennik, Creative Destruction Lab

Ioana Marinescu, University of Pennsylvania

Nicholas Bloom, Stanford University

Johannes Hermle, Anthropic

Ashesh Rambachan, MIT

Brian Jabarian, Carnegie Mellon University

Lukas Althoff, Stanford University

Soumitra Shukla, Harvard Business School

Andrey Fradkin, Boston University

Andrew Koh, Columbia University

Prasanna Tambe, University of Pennsylvania

Cheryl Wu, Yale University

Albert Wenger, Union Square Ventures

Gigi Danziger, Eutopia

Chris Tonetti, Stanford University

Justin Bullock, University of Washington

Bryan Seegmiller, Northwestern University

Betsey Stevenson, University of Michigan

Stefanie Stantcheva, Harvard University

Justin Wolfers, University of Michigan

Eva Lyubich, Anthropic

Chrishan Thuraisingham

Szymon Sacher, Anthropic

Thomas Houlden, Columbia University

Ben Golub, Northwestern University

Carlos J. Serrano, HEC Paris

Heski Bar-Isaac, University of Toronto

William Strange, University of Toronto

Jen Baggs, University of Victoria

Victor Aguirregabiria, University of Toronto

Melissa Lynne Dell, Harvard University

Jasmine Sun

Rob Reich, Stanford University

James Landay, Stanford University

Anousheh Ansari, XPRIZE Foundation

Fiona Chen, Harvard University

Michael Nayak, XPRIZE Foundation

George Williamson, The Alan Turing Institute

Michael Chui, McKinsey

Gabriel Unger, Stanford University

Katya Klinova

Parker Whitfill, METR

Arvind Karunakaran, Stanford University

Georgios Petropoulos, University of Southern California Marshall School of Business

José Ramón Enríquez, Stanford University

Christos Makridis, Arizona State University

Luca Vendraminelli, Stanford University

Alvin Wang Graylin, Stanford University

Sophia Kazinnik, Stanford University

Christina Langer, Stanford University

Riitta Katila, Stanford University

Lynn Wu, University of Pennsylvania

Matt Beane, University of California, Santa Barbara

David Nguyen, Stanford University

Avinash Collis, Carnegie Mellon University

Pamela Mishkin, Stanford University

Andy Haupt, Stanford University

Neale Mahoney, Stanford University

Robb Willer, Stanford University

Sinan Aral, MIT

Thomas W. Malone, MIT

Wajeeha Ahmad, Stanford University

Diyi Yang, Stanford University

Mary MacLennan

Wang Jin, Chapman University

Arjun Ramani, MIT

Glen Weyl, Microsoft Research

J. Frank Li, University of British Columbia

Jeremy Howard, fast.ai

Matt Gentzkow, Stanford University

Bharat Chandar, Stanford University

Jiaxin Pei, Stanford University

Sarah Bana, Chapman University

Christie Ko, Stanford University

Susan Young, Stanford University

*Nobel laureate

    Show all signatures
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