More than 200 economists and AI researchers, among them sixteen Nobel laureates and executives from Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI, signed a four-sentence open letter warning that AI could trigger an economic transformation larger than the Industrial Revolution, but arriving so much faster that the policy systems built to absorb technological shocks may not be capable of adapting in time. The joint statement, titled "We Must Act Now: A Statement on AI's Transformation of the Economy," was released July 13, 2026, by Stanford University's Digital Economy Lab. The statement was organized by economists Erik Brynjolfsson, Ajay Agrawal, Anton Korinek, and Tom Cunningham.
By July 15, the signatory list was approaching 2,000, spanning figures identified with the political left (Paul Krugman) and right (Niall Ferguson, Tyler Cowen), as well as technologists (Reid Hoffman, Eric Schmidt) and policymakers (Jason Furman, Gita Gopinath, Gina Raimondo). The roster also includes the chief economists of both OpenAI and Anthropic, alongside Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun. "Steam, electricity and computers each gave societies decades to adapt; AI may give us only a few years," said Anton Korinek, a University of Virginia economist and one of the statement's organizers. Nobel laureate and NYU professor emeritus Michael Spence said the situation calls for "an 'all hands on deck' approach to steering AI in beneficial directions."
The letter's most important signal may be not what it says, but who signed it: Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, the MIT professors who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in economics and who spent years pushing back on what they considered AI displacement hype, are now among the signatories calling for urgent institutional action. "If you look at what robots did in the manufacturing sector, if AI does something equivalent in a more compressed time period, that would be really disruptive, really costly for people's livelihoods," Acemoglu said, according to the Times. Stanford economist Erik Brynjolfsson, who helped organize the effort, said there has been "a notable change in the profession," according to the New York Times.
Skeptics have found grounds for caution in the document's own design. For all the standing of its signatories, the letter is spare, four sentences that name no specific policy measures or timelines. The organizers were able to get such broad agreement in part by keeping the statement tight and vague. The presence of frontier-lab executives among the authors also invites the question of whether industry is helping to shape the policy conversation it created. Acemoglu himself maintains residual skepticism about whether AI will prove as revolutionary as quickly as Silicon Valley predicts, though recent advances have heightened his concerns about job losses; he has advocated for AI laboratories to focus on tools that augment human capabilities rather than replace workers entirely.
Students now in university will enter a labor market that the people who built it are publicly admitting they cannot predict.