AI executives and Nobel economists urge rapid policy response
More than 200 economists and technology leaders, including 15 Nobel laureates and top AI executives, have warned that artificial intelligence could outpace the Industrial Revolution in speed and scale, urging immediate policy frameworks to prevent severe labour market disruption.
Over 200 researchers and economists issued a joint statement on Monday calling for governments and technology leaders to urgently build policies addressing the economic impact of artificial intelligence. The group includes 15 Nobel laureates and senior figures from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google.
This represents a rare consensus between leading economic thinkers and the executives building the technology. Such alignment underscores the growing belief that current market frameworks are unprepared for the speed of impending changes.
The statement warns that artificial intelligence will trigger an economic transformation larger than the Industrial Revolution, but in a vastly shorter timeframe. For investors and corporate strategists, this drastically compresses the window to price in AI-driven productivity gains against the systemic risk of large-scale job displacement.
Anton Korinek, a University of Virginia professor who joined Anthropic's economic research team in March, highlighted the compressed adaptation window. "Steam, electricity, and computers each gave societies decades to adapt. AI may give us only a few years," he said.
Korinek organized the initiative alongside economists Erik Brynjolfsson, Ajay Agrawal and Tom Cunningham. He stressed the cost of regulatory and corporate delay. "We cannot improvise our strategy and institutions in the middle of the transformation; waiting for certainty means arriving too late."
The presence of senior industry figures underscores that AI developers anticipate severe structural shocks. Signatories include OpenAI finance chief Sarah Friar, Google DeepMind Chief Scientist Jeff Dean, and Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark. Nobel laureates Michael Spence, Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson also backed the warning.
The coalition is demanding deeper research into these economic shocks and the rapid construction of new policy frameworks to ensure the technology benefits society. For financial markets, the intervention signals that the technology's own architects view the coming transition as a structural break rather than a gradual evolution, demanding immediate institutional preparation.
