OpenAI’s vision for the AI economy: public wealth funds, robot taxes, and a four-day work week

As governments grapple with how to manage the economic fallout of superintelligent machines, OpenAI has released a set of policy proposals outlining the ways wealth and work could be reshaped in an “intelligence age.” The ideas blend traditionally left-leaning mechanisms like public wealth funds and expanded social safety nets with a fundamentally capitalist, market-driven economic framework. 

The proposals were released amid intensifying anxiety around AI, which has been colored by concerns over job displacement, wealth concentration, and data center buildouts across the country. They’ve also arrived as the Trump administration moves toward a national AI framework and in the run-up to the midterm elections, signaling an attempt at bipartisan positioning. That effort sits alongside a more direct political push: OpenAI President Greg Brockman — who has donated millions to President Donald Trump — and other tech billionaires have funneled hundreds of millions into super PACs supporting light-touch AI policies.  

OpenAI’s proposed framework centers on three stated goals: distributing AI-driven prosperity more broadly, building safeguards to reduce systemic risks, and ensuring widespread access to AI capabilities so that economic power and opportunity don’t become too concentrated. 

OpenAI has proposed shifting the tax burden from labor to capital. The company stops short of specifying a corporate tax rate — which Trump dropped to 21% from 35% during his first term. But OpenAI warns that AI-driven growth could hollow out the tax base that funds Social Security, Medicaid, SNAP, and housing assistance as corporate profits expand and reliance on labor income shrinks. 

“As AI reshapes work and production, the composition of economic activity may shift—expanding corporate profits and capital gains while potentially reducing reliance on labor income and payroll taxes,” OpenAI wrote. 

The company suggests higher taxes on corporate income, AI-driven returns, or capital gains at the top — a category of policy that pushed Marc Andreessen to back Trump after Biden proposed taxing unrealized capital gains in 2024. OpenAI also floats a potential robot tax, something Microsoft founder Bill Gates proposed in 2017, which involved the robot paying the same amount of taxes into the system as the human it replaced. 

The document also includes a proposal to create a Public Wealth Fund to give Americans an automatic public stake in AI companies and AI infrastructure, even if they’re not invested in the market. Any returns would be distributed directly to citizens. The prospect may appeal to Americans who have watched AI inflate the market without seeing any of those gains themselves.

Several of OpenAI’s proposals were also more labor-focused, including one to subsidize a four-day work week with no loss in pay — a proposal that aligns with the tech industry’s promises that AI will give humans better work-life balance. OpenAI also suggests that companies boost retirement matches or contributions, cover a larger share of healthcare costs, and subsidize child or eldercare. Notably, OpenAI frames these as corporate responsibilities rather than government ones, leaving out the people AI is most likely to displace. If automation eliminates your job, your employer-subsidized healthcare and retirement match may go with it.

That said, OpenAI does separately propose portable benefit accounts that follow workers across jobs, but these still likely depend on employer or platform contributions and stop short of the government-backed universal coverage that would actually protect people AI displaces entirely.

OpenAI acknowledges that the risks of AI go beyond job loss, including misuse by governments or bad actors and the possibility of systems operating beyond human control. To mitigate those threats, it proposes containment plans for dangerous AI, new oversight bodies, and targeted safeguards against high-risk uses like cyberattacks and biological threats. 

But with the safety nets and guardrails come the growth proposals, including expanding electricity infrastructure to support AI’s power demands and accelerating AI infrastructure buildouts by offering subsidies, tax credits, or equity stakes. OpenAI says AI should be treated like a utility, and to that end, suggests industry and government work together to ensure AI remains affordable and widely available, rather than controlled by just a few firms. 

OpenAI’s framework comes six months after rival Anthropic released its policy blueprint, which laid out a range of possible responses to AI-driven disruption. 

“We are entering a new phase of economic and social organization that will fundamentally reshape work, knowledge, and production,” OpenAI wrote. This, the company says, requires a “new industrial policy agenda that ensures superintelligence benefits everyone.”

OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit premised on AI benefiting all of humanity. It became a for-profit company last year, a shift that has led critics to question whether its stated mission is compatible with its need to grow and fulfill its fiduciary duty to shareholders.

The company cited previous ages of economic upheaval like the Industrial Age, pointing to how new economic and financial movements like the New Deal ensured “growth translated into broader opportunity and greater security” by “building new public institutions, protections, and expectations about what a fair economy should provide, including labor protections, safety standards, social safety nets, and expanded access to education.”

“The transition to superintelligence will require an even more ambitious form of industrial policy, one that reflects the ability of democratic societies to act collectively, at scale, to shape their economic future so that superintelligence benefits everyone,” OpenAI wrote.